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'The Ethical Significance 
of Feeling, Pleasure, and 
Happiness in Modern 
Non- Hedonistic Systems 

. % 

WILLIAM KELLEY WRIGHT, Ph.D. 



PHILOSOPHIC STUDIES 

NUMBER I 



CHICAGO 

fHE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 

1907 



PHILOSOPHIC STUDIES 



The Ethical Significance of Feeling, Pleasure, and Happiness in Modern 
Non -Hedonistic Systems. By William Kelley Wright. 96 pp., 
royal 8vo, paper, net 50 cents; postpaid 54 




PHILOSOPHIC STUDIES 

OF 

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 



EDITED BY 

JAMES H. TUFTS 



EDITORIAL ANNOUNCEMENT 

The Department of Philosophy in the University of Chicago will 
issue a series of monographs in philosophy, including ethics, logic and 
metaphysics, aesthetics, and the history of philosophy. The successive 
monographs will be numbered consecutively, but will not be arranged 
as volumes. These studies will be similar to the series of Contribu- 
tions to Philosophy, but will not, like that series, contain psychologi- 
cal papers, or reprints of articles previously published. 

Beyond the present initial number, the Department announces as 
No. 2 The Respective Standpoints of Logic and Psychology ', by Matilde 
Castro, Ph.D. 



THE ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF FEEL- 
ING, PLEASURE, AND HAPPINESS IN 
MODERN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 



BY 



WILLIAM KELLEY WRIGHT, Ph.D. 



CHICAGO 
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 

1907 






tUBKARY of CONGRESS 

Iwo Cooies Received 

OCT §tf ^Of 
-, Copyright Entry 

Oct zC tUl 

CUSS/4 XXc, No/ 



COPY tl. 



Copyright 1907 By 
The Uniyebsity of Chicago 



Published October 1907 



Composed and Printed By 

The University of Chicago Press 

Chicago, Illinois, U. S. A. 



f\ 



J 



NOTE 

The writer desires to express his gratitude to Professors Mead, Moore, 
and Angell, and Dr. Watson, of the University of Chicago, with whom 
he has had courses in ethics and psychology. His chief obligation, especi- 
ally in the preparation of this essay, is to Professor Tufts, of whose counsel 
and sympathy he has largely availed himself, both in the definition of the 
problem and also in specific points of interpretation and criticism. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. Introduction 7 

II. The Perfectionists 9 

a. Descartes . 13 

b Malebranche 17 

c. Spinoza 20 

d. Leibniz 23 

e. Wolff 26 

III. The British Non-Hedonists 30 

A. Attempts to Save Morality by Widening the Conception of 
Pleasure ^ 

A. Shaftesbury 33 

b. Hutcheson 35 

c. Hartley 38 

D. Hume 40 

e. Adam Smith 42 

B. Systems Revealing an Increasing Divergence between Morality 
and Pleasure, and a Gradual Repudiation of Pleasure as Exclu- 
sive Motive 43 

a. Butler 43 

b. Price 45 

c. Reid 47 

d. Dugald Stewart 48 

e. Thomas Brown 49 

f. Later Intuitionists 51 

IV. Modified Perfectionism 53 

a. Mendelssohn 53 

b. Tetens and Schmidt 55 

V. Kant ' 57 

a. The Early Rationalistic Period 57 

b. The Period of English Influence 58 

c. From the Inaugural Dissertation to the Critique of Pure 
Reason 60 

d The Ethical System in its Final Form 64 

5 



6 TABLE OF CONTENTS 

PAGE 

VI. Several Nineteenth-Century Non-Hedonists 72 

a. Fichte and Hegel 73 

b. Schopenhauer 79 

c. Herbart 81 

d. Lotze 82 

e. Green 85 

e. Nietzsche 89 

VII. Conclusion 92 



I. INTRODUCTION 

During the Middle Ages such a question as what significance should 
be attributed to pleasure in a moral system could hardly have arisen. 
We may distinguish a kind of feeling and happiness in the ecstasy of the 
Mystics; but pleasure in the modern sense of the term could hardly have 
been regarded as of much moral value, even if it were not reprobated as 
indissolubly bound up with the world, the flesh, and the devil. 

In modern times, however, the situation has been quite different. 
A considerable proportion of the leading ethical systems have frankly 
made pleasure the necessary motive to moral action, and many also have 
gone so far as to make it also the criterion of moral values, and to declare 
that no action is of moral significance except so far as it furnishes pleasure 
to a sentient being. In addition to the ethical writers who thus are to 
be classed as hedonists, there is another large class of writers who, while 
refusing to make pleasure the standard of morality, nevertheless seem 
aware that it is too prominent a feature of our conscious life, and too 
intimately connected with the springs to action, not to possess some sig- 
nificance. 

It is with this second class of writers that we have to do here, and it 
will be the effort of this dissertation to show that pleasure — and, as arising 
out of pleasure and connected with it, feeling and happiness — do serve a 
position of some importance in their thought, to a much larger degree 
than perhaps is generally understood. While, naturally enough, most 
non-hedonistic writers discourse at greater length against pleasure and 
happiness in the way that they are employed by the hedonists, than they 
do in the positive employment of them in their own systems, nevertheless 
they do make use of them in a very explicit way, and to a considerable 
extent. In other cases one is able to detect a large implicit recognition 
of feeling and happiness as integral features of moral action. 

The non-hedonistic writers here to be considered fall into three prin- 
cipal groups: (1) the rationalistic perfectionists; (2) the British moral 
sense writers, and their intuitionist successors; (3) Kant, and some of 
the idealists who have followed him. 

The ethical conceptions of the perfectionist school were derived by 
its founder, Descartes, largely from ancient sources — Aristotle, the Stoics. 
and the Epicureans all furnishing contributions. These contributions 

7 



8 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

were not simply stuck together into a crude eclecticism, but molded into 
an integral system. Self-realization, under the modified form of perfection, 
became the moral ideal, virtue was the practice of this morality, pleasure 
was the consciousness of successful progress in its attainment, and happi- 
ness was the final reward associated with its achievement. For a time 
this combination seemed to work with entire satisfaction; but later a 
growing sense of a larger moral content, upon the one hand, and the nar- 
rowing of the content which could be included within the conception of 
perfection, upon the other, forced a divergence that could not be overcome. 
Pleasure, perfection, and duty no longer could be regarded as coincident. 

Among the British writers the development was similar, but more 
rapid. Their observation was not limited to the use of a formal conception 
and a mathematical method. Shaftesbury laid rather more emphasis 
upon the feeling side of perfection than Descartes had done; and the 
greater attention to the feeling side of morality which was given by his 
successors soon disclosed a serious divergence between its demands and 
those of duty. At first the attempt was made to overcome this by widen- 
ing the conception of pleasure so as to include the pleasures of the moral 
sense, and of sympathy; but after Butler the coincidence was usually 
not regarded as immediate, and arguments were devised to minimize the 
divergence as much as possible, and postulate an ultimate reconciliation 
in a future life. 

Kant inherited from his perfectionist predecessors the desire for a 
rational principle of morality, while at the same time his predecessors 
in England awakened him to the prominence of pleasure and feeling in 
action, and to their worth as moral content. After failing to find a rational 
principle in pleasure on account of its contingent and empirical nature, 
he was forced to abandon its employment as a moral criterion, but he 
continued to allot to it such a part of the ground which it had previously 
occupied in his thought as more important claims did not preclude. The 
successors of Kant occupied various attitudes. Fichte, Hegel, and T. H. 
Green continued to regard pleasure as contingent and empirical, but 
still as possessing certain functional significance in moral action. Scho- 
penhauer derived pessimistic conclusions from the failure to find ad- 
equate rational principles in pleasure. Schopenhauer, Herbart, and Lotze 
discovered a significance for morals in the pleasures of aesthetic contem- 
plation. Last of all, Nietzsche found a certain functional significance in 
pleasure, as representing a primitive form of moral judgment. 



II. THE PERFECTIONISTS 

PLEASURE, FEELING, AND HAPPINESS DEFINED IN TERMS OF 

PERFECTION 

The men of the Renaissance were in search of a wider, fuller life. 
They wished to enjoy all of the good things of this world. Pleasure, of 
course, seemed to be one of these good things, and so it had to be related 
in some way to the highest good. They also wished to avail themselves 
of all the best things in ancient philosophy. Descartes accordingly 
snatched upon the Aristotelian conception of self-realization, combined 
with it the Stoic conception of virtue, and made the union of the two, 
which he called "perfection," coincident with Epicurean pleasure and 
happiness, rightly understood. Malebranche went on to develop more 
fully the religious side of the doctrine. Thus there was at the outset a 
tendency to comprehend as much as possible under the conceptions of 
perfection and happiness. 

On the other hand, the new method introduced by Descartes finally 
tended to narrow the bounds of moral activity. Nothing could be moral, 
which could not be deduced from the concept of perfection. As the mathe- 
matical method became applied more rigidly, the contents of perfection 
became more limited, and only those pleasures could still be regarded 
as moral which could be included within these contents. As happiness 
continued to be identified with perfection, only certain classes of pleasures 
could be included within it. Furthermore, as the interests of the school 
were intellectual rather than practical, the cognitive aspects of pleasure 
received their attention, rather than its real nature as affection. 

To the whole school, perfection is the summum bonnm. Happiness 
is the reward which leads us to seek perfection, and so is extremely closely 
connected with it. The general tendency — and it is a strong one — is 
to define both happiness and pleasure in what seem to us purely cognitive 
terms. As their psychology did not know our modern tripartite and 
bipartite divisions, their happiness and pleasure had volitional char- 
acteristics, as well as the affective characteristics which we attribute to 
them; but their chief interest and attention were almost wholly devoted 
to ascertaining the function, and determining the value for moral action, 
of the cognitive elements which they attributed to pleasure. 

Happiness is "the consciousness of all the perfection of which we are 

9 



io PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

capable." 1 It is consciousness of perfection as a whole, and is perma- 
nent. Pleasure is consciousness of a perfection; it is finite, particular, 
transient. 2 In one sense happiness and pleasure do not represent a funda- 
mental opposition in the judgment of the school. Both are endeavors 
to appraise and evaluate the perfection which one experiences. Pleasure 
represents a more quickly formed judgment, and is functionally useful 
because we cannot always stop and deliberate. However, on account of 
its hastiness, and consequent lack of clear and comprehensive insight, 
it is liable to error. 

While both pleasure and happiness are consciousness of perfection, 
happiness is not a sum of pleasures. It is due to an independent intellectual 
process, resulting in consciousness of a perfect adjustment of all the fac- 
ulties working under the government of the reason. 3 Some of the school 
regard happiness as a state of absolute, eternal perfection; others, as one 
of constant progress in the attainment of new and higher perfections; 
all, as the incitement to, and reward of, moral effort, and to all it is mainly 
a personal, individualistic acquisition, with little content of a social char- 
acter. 

The school also differ as regards the extent of pleasure, some recog- 
nizing intellectual pleasure, while others do not seem to do so. This 
depends largely upon the rigidity with which the mathematical method 
is employed. All regard the emotional side of our nature as cognitive 
in character, and as quicker, but less accurate, in its perceptions than 
the reason. Consequently, those who use the mathematical method 
most closely have to confine their attention to this cognitive aspect of 
feeling. Hence Wolff wholly (and Spinoza mainly) limits pleasure to 
this hasty, and hence confused, cognition of perfection. Spinoza expects 
pleasure to disappear in clear thought; Wolff recognizes its utility as a 
good servant kept in subordination to the reason. Descartes, Malebranche, 
and Leibniz, on the other hand, recognized intellectual pleasure attend- 
ing the operations of the reason itself. For them reason also plays an im- 
portant function in discerning the actual amount of perfection represented 
by the different forms of pleasure, and directs action so as to obtain the 
most perfection (and consequently the most pleasure) possible. To 
Spinoza and Wolff pleasure is confused thought; to Descartes we expe- 
rience, as a result of the action of the passions, a false notion of both 

1 Beatitudo, la beatitude, Glilckseligkeit, or Seligkeit. 

2 Laetitia, la plaisir; with Wolff, voluptas, Lust. 

3 This statement does not wholly apply to Spinoza, who has no place for the 
lower faculties in his beatitudo. 



THE PERFECTIONISTS n 

the pleasure and the perfection experienced; and reason, in leading us 
to estimate perfection correctly, leads us to estimate pleasure correctly 
also. To the former pleasure is always confused consciousness of per- 
fection; to the latter it is sometimes clear and distinct consciousness of 
perfection as well. Malebranche supplements Descartes' statement bv 
making a clear and distinct perception of perfection and pleasure consist 
in the recognition of God as efficient cause of the perception; while a 
confused perception is one in which this causality is not recognized. 

The perfectionists hit upon three psychological points in respect to 
pleasure which were of importance in the development of their systems: 
(i) that novelty is of importance in it; (2) that it is more intense when 
attended by emotional excitement; (3) that it owes its origin in some 
way to external stimulation, or to images, or to something that is in some 
way extrinsic to the pleasure itself. 

1. It is very evident to anyone that our enjoyment, in most things 
at least, wears away with familiarity. What at first afforded keen enjoy- 
ment is experienced with indifference, and finally becomes disagreeable. 
The modern theory is that it is the function of pleasure to excite us to 
action in novel situations, and this necessity is no longer present when 
the action necessary has become well known and tends to the habitual. 
The perfectionists were quite aware of this characteristic of pleasure, 
and derived important conclusions from it. Descartes, Leibniz, and 
Wolff include pleasure in the state of happiness, since to them happiness 
is a state of progress and activity, and is situated within the temporal 
order. The progress must be so rapid that before old pleasures begin to 
pall, new ones shall always have been acquired. Thus the search for 
pleasure becomes a positive incitement to moral progress. The new 
pleasures acquired of course always represent higher stages of perfection 
than the ones which preceded them. A transition to a lower state of 
perfection would be accompanied by pain. Spinoza attributes the same 
function to pleasure and pain. They define the content of desire in any 
given experience, and thus direct the conaius sui perseruarandi along 
the line of moral progress. But Spinoza does not conceive of happiness 
as something to be attained within the temporal order. Consequently, 
while the impetus of pleasure with him, as with the others, is in the direc- 
tion of moral progress, he attempts, though not with entire success, to 
exclude it from the final state of eternal perfection. 

2. It is also an unquestioned fact that intense pleasure is accompanied 
by strong emotional content, and that at such times our reasoning faculties 
are not, to sav the least, at their best. We reason best when we are cool 



12 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

and deliberate,, and are not strongly aware of any particular pleasure or 
pain, but are simply in a state of comfort, free from disturbing elements 
of all kinds, pleasant and unpleasant, bodily and mental. For clearness 
of thought, then, we wish a minimum of pleasure and pain. On the other 
hand, when we are experiencing considerable pleasure or pain, our thoughts 
are confused; and we cannot carry on any lengthy and connected thought, 
to say the least, under such circumstances. 

These facts naturally led a school who regarded pleasure as a form 
of cognition to regard it as confused thought. We can readily see the 
psychology that lies back of Spinoza's regarding the state of perfection 
as devoid of pleasure altogether, or, at least, as attended only by "calm 
acquiescence," and other like terms which seem to suggest a state of 
physical and mental comfort, quite free from any very strong affective 
content. The happiness which attends a state of intellectual perfection 
had to be free from pleasure altogether, unless pleasure should be con- 
ceived of as having qualitative distinctions. And this is of course what 
Descartes and Malebranche try to do — make qualitative distinctions in 
pleasure — when they have pleasures of purely intellectual origin, and 
those which, though also psychical, are due to the stimulation of the mind 
by the animal spirits. 

3. While we read in works of fiction of people exuberant with "the 
joys of mere living," "feeling how good it is just to be alive," all will 
agree that the great bulk of pleasure experienced is due to some extrinsic 
cause or other. It may be that the pleasure is caused by a beautiful 
painting or some sublime music; it may be due to a good cigar or a box 
of chocolate creams; or, indeed, to the sight of a brave or generous action. 
Again, it may be caused by an image of some past event that arises in the 
mind; or it may be due to egotistical self-congratulation on some fine 
quality which we fancy that we possess. In any case, it has a definite 
extrinsic cause, external to the pleasure itself, and this is some form of 
cognitive content. The affective tone is referred to some definite sensa- 
tion or image as its cause. 

Now, if we accept the definition of pleasure as a sense of some per- 
fection, it seems to follow from the examples cited in the preceding para- 
graph, that the "perfection" may be of a personal character. One' may 
derive pleasure from the consciousness of one's own powers, or the per- 
fection may be due to an external object, and have nothing to do with 
one's own perfection at all. At least this is the way the matter appeared 
to Wolff. The writers previous to Leibniz did not consider the question 
whether perfection had to be one's own to produce pleasure. It is probable 



THE PERFECTIONISTS 13 

that they had the Aristotelian definition in mind, 1 and by " consciousness 
of perfection," so far as they had thought the matter out, they meant 
the conscious exercise of one's capacities in the way for which they are 
fitted. However, their ambiguity led Wolff, justifiably enough, to derive 
the other view from them. The inadequacy for psychological purposes 
of such a view as that advanced by Wolff has been pointed out very 
forcibly by Hamilton. It is equally barren for ethical purposes. How 
pleasure can possibly be a guide to moral conduct in any way if it is incited 
quite as much by external objects which have no obvious ethical relation- 
ship to one, as by one's own moral perfections (and, in the case of pain, 
by one's own moral imperfections), it is hard to see. 

With all the school a perfect parallel between happiness and perfection 
is assumed. Happiness is the state of consciousness that accompanies 
perfection. This agreeable feeling needs not to be present all of the time 
but whenever one thinks of one's perfection it should be present. No 
difficulty about the perfect identity between happiness and the conscious- 
ness of perfection seems to have been raised. Upon the relationship of 
happiness and pleasure, and of pleasure to the emotions, there was some 
difference of opinion. To all of the school, however, the state of perfection 
involved, as one of its main characteristics, clearness of insight. Rational 
judgments, clear and distinct thoughts, were exceedingly prominent in 
the beatific vision of every rationalist. 

A. DESCARTES 

Descartes describes pleasure as the " feeling or sense of some per- 
fection." Pleasure and pain are not very closely defined. As synony- 
mous with " pleasant," we have such words as "agreeable" and "useful" 
(convenable) and even bien. Chatouillement seems sometimes to mean 
sensual pleasure, and sometimes the cause of it. 2 It is associated with 
two of the passions, la joie and V amour — or rather is their cause, it is 
perhaps better to say — and furnishes the impulse to desire. Pain, in like 
manner, is associated with la tristesse and la haine, and furnishes the 
impulse to desire in the negative sense. 

Descartes distinguishes three different types of pleasure: (1) an initial 
feeling (sentiment), upon the presence of which joy and desire follow, 
due to external stimulation; (2) an agreeable passion = joy; (3) a purely 

1 Cf., Sir William Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics, II, 461 f. 

2 Cf., e. g., Passions, XCIV. The Passions is cited by the section numbers in 
Roman numerals; the correspondence is cited from the edition of Victor Cousin 
( = C.) and Adam and Tannery ( = A. & T.). 



14 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

psychical experience which the mind has independently of the body. It 
is with the last two, of course, that we are mainly concerned in the study 
of ethics. 

The passions are distinctly psychical states, but are due to the action 
of the body upon the mind. In Descartes' physiological account the 
animal spirits, which pass through the nerves, are supposed to impinge 
upon the pineal gland, or conarium, the principal seat of the soul; and, 
in consequence of this agitation from without, the various passions are 
experienced in the sou]. Since the passions are due to the violent stimu- 
lation of the animal spirits, and the mind in experiencing them is liable 
not to be working in an orderly manner, the passions are confused ideas 
in the mind. 1 For the same reason, the real amount of pleasure contained 
in a passion is liable to be vastly exaggerated. Moreover, since this pleas- 
ure is at best due only to bodily perfection, which is temporary in character, 
these bodily pleasures must be submitted to the scrutiny of the reason, 
in order not to become rated too highly. 

Passions, however, though liable to be overrated, do have a value. 
They are all good in their nature ; the only thing that we need fear is their 
wrong use or excess. 2 Indeed, in the concluding section of the Passions 
he seems to allot to them a larger part of the pleasure of life than in other 
passages in his works. Here he says that, while the mind has pleasures 
of its own apart from the body, yet most of the pleasures of this life are 
due to them, and most Of the pains as well. So that the function of the 
reason is so to direct them as to obtain the most pleasure that can be 
derived from them. 

Opposed to the passions, however, in being much more permanent, 
and more clearly perceived, are the pleasures of the mind itself. The 
mind is secure in the possession of these. Under this head, apparently, 
would come most of those pleasures which the English school, quoting 
Addison, call " pleasures of the imagination," and all pleasures due to 
the action of the mind itself, not directly dependent upon sense stimula- 
tion. Thus, in the letter to the queen of Sweden 3 he declares that the 
exercise of our free will — which is purely a mental act with Descartes — 
affords "a pleasure beyond comparison more sweet, more lasting, and 
substantial than all that come from any other source. " 

i C, X, 5, 63; A. & T., IV, 602 f.; V, 85; Principes, § 190 (A. & T., IX, 311 f.). 

2 Passions, CCXI. 

3 Quoted from The Philosophy of Descartes, by H. A. P. Torrey; cf. also Pas- 
sions, CXLVII, CXLVIII; C, IX, 214, 234; A. & T., IV, 267, 294; C, IX, 371- 
78; A. & T, IV, 351-57. 



THE PERFECTIONISTS 15 

Happiness {beatitude) consists of the conscious possession of all the 
perfection of which we are capable. This is mainly to be found in intel- 
lectual pleasures. He is, however, by no means a hedonist, even of a 
highly intellectual type, for he takes great pains to explain that he does 
not regard happiness as the highest good, though he says that it is very 
closely connected with it, and is the 

contentment or satisfaction of mind which results from its possession. By the 
end of our action we must understand both; for the highest good is undoubtedly 
that which we ought to propose to ourselves as the end in all our actions; and 
the contentment of mind which springs from it, being the attraction which makes 
us seek it, is also with good reason called our end. 1 

The supreme good is therefore virtue, the possession of all the good 
(i. e., perfection) of which we are capable. 2 The inducement to seek 
this is beatitude, and possession of the highest good involves this also. 
Virtue alone is sufficient to make us happy in this life. 3 One should, of 
course, by means of the reason, carefully evaluate all the different pleasures 
suggested by the passions, and desire to obtain them so far as he is able 
to get them. Reason teaches us that the sine qua non for happiness is 
calmness and acquiescence of mind, and that in this alone, and in the 
intellectual pleasures obtainable by everyone, true happiness may be 
found, quite independently of any physical pleasures; nay, even our 
pains upon the physical and passionate side may afford us intellectual 
pleasure in the mind itself. 4 

To obtain beatitude three things are necessary: (1) to use the mind 
in the best way possible to find out what ought to be done; (2) to carry 
out everything that reason dictates regardless of passions and appetites; 
(3) to desire nothing beyond one's own capacities. The last two pre- 
scriptions, Descartes thought, are really involved in the first one. If one 
clearly sees what he ought to do, he will do it. This, of course, follows 
upon his treatment of the passions as confused ideas; if they are clearly 
perceived by the reason and given their true value, one will not be tempted 
to act upon them at the wrong time, since he will also behold the greater 
attractiveness in beatitude, which accompanies virtue. And if one per- 

iTorrey, op. cit., 332 f.; C, IX, 219; A. & T., IV, 275; cf. also C, IX. 137; 
A. & T, 305. 

* C, IX, 225 f.; X, 60 f.; A. & T., IV, 283 f.; V, Si ff. 

3C, IX, 214; A. & T., IV 266 f. 

4 Passions, CXLVII, gives an instance of this of a rather low sort; while C 
IX, 231-34 (A. & T., IV, 292-04), shows this by pointing ont the transcendent social 
and religious pleasures. 



1 6 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

ceives that something is beyond one's power to obtain, one will not 
desire it. 1 

Descartes recognizes a much larger social content in his happiness 
than any of his perfectionist successors, except perhaps Malebranche. 
Love is a large source of pleasure to us ; and in his idea of love we identify 
ourselves with the beloved object in a way that almost seems to suggest 
some of our modern ideas of the social self. Love causes us to regard 
ourselves and the objects of our affection as a whole of which we are only 
a part — sometimes much the less important part. If this object is some- 
thing which one considers less important than one's self, like a flower or 
a bird, one would not make great sacrifices for it; but if one thinks of it 
as vastly more important — as one 's prince or one 's country, for example — 
one would not hesitate to give up one's life for its sake. 2 Greatest of all 
is our love for God. Regarding him as the source of all perfection, and 
loving him as such, one would not hesitate to abandon all to his will, and 
have no other passion than to do what is agreeable to him; 3 from this 
we shall get a satisfaction of mind vastly superior to the pleasures of the 
senses. This love of God with Descartes is of a distinctly affective char- 
acter, and is active. 

The distinction between the cognitive and affective processes, upon 
which modern psychology lays so much emphasis, Descartes did not 
have very clearly in mind. The distinction which most concerned Des- 
cartes was that which he made between the action of the mind independ- 
ently of the body, and that occasioned by the body. For this reason we 
must not press the charge of reducing pleasure and emotion to cognitive 
terms too strongly with reference to Descartes. The tendency of the 
mathematical method was clearly in that direction; but Descartes' emo- 
tions of the soul seem to be as genuine a part of reality as any other intel- 
lectual content. It is only the passions, due to the action of the body, 
which are confused. And so long as the mathematical method was used 
only in the manner of Descartes, the tendency to reduce feeling to intellect 
was in no danger of reaching the absurd lengths which we shall discover 
in the case of Spinoza. 

In Descartes' position we find the main points of the perfectionist 
position stated in their original form. Pleasure is the consciousness of 
some perfection. It is always psychical, and is due either to bodily or 

i C, IX, 212 f.; A. & T., 265 f.; cf. Professor Max Heinze, Die Sittenlehre des 
Descartes, 15 f. 

«C, X, 15 f.; A. & T., V, 611 f. 
3 C, IX, 234; A. & T., IV, 294. 



THE PERFECTIONISTS 17 

to purely intellectual origin. It furnishes the initial spring to action. 
Happiness is composed of pleasures, and is at the same time due to the 
consciousness of the possession of all the perfection of which we are 
capable. Happiness and virtue are so closely related that it is scarcely 
necessary to distinguish between them, both being concerned with per- 
fection. The difficulties involved in the combination of pleasure, happi- 
ness, and virtue under the conception of perfection have not yet become 
apparent. While the passions are regarded as confused thought, the 
mathematical method has not been developed far enough to lead to the 
classification of all feeling in this manner, nor to lead to a narrowing of 
the social content in morality. 1 

B. MALEBRANCHE 

The philosophy of Malebranche as a whole represents an attempt, 
not only to bring Cartesianism into full harmony with the Roman Catholic 
faith but to cause it to afford a satisfactory philosophical statement of 
the doctrines of the church and thus take the place of scholasticism. As 
a devout Christian, Malebranche wished to make his philosophical beliefs 
serviceable in the expression and interpretation of religion. His treat- 
ment of pleasure and pain is actuated by this motive. 

God is the efficient cause of everything which comes to pass. He is 
therefore the cause of our sensations and feelings. He has implanted 
within us a desire for pleasure and an aversion to pain. This is in order 
that we may seek what is good, and avoid what is evil. He goes on to 
identify pleasure with the good, and pain with the evil. 2 Pleasure and 
pain are thus the immediate springs to action, and also enable us to dis- 
tinguish good from evil. 

Thus far, Malebranche seems to be a thoroughgoing hedonist. The 
difference, however, is not far to seek. Perfection is the summum bonum. 
To have perfection is to share in universal order. It is in order that we 

1 The question is sometimes raised as to whether we are to accept Descartes' 
ethical statements at their face value, or whether they are to be thought of as written 
mainly to please the distinguished ladies to whom they are addressed, and as con- 
cealing his real thought rather than expressing it. It must be admitted that Des- 
cartes was a rare artist at paying compliments; but his ethical presentation scorns to 
the present writer quite in general agreement with his philosophy as a whole, so far 
as he has developed it. His desire that his letters on ethics should be read only by 
those to whom they were addressed is hardly an indication that he was concealing 
his real thought in them, but exactly the opposite. He was expressing himself frankly 
upon a field that he felt to be delicate, and he did not care that his enemies should 
see what he had written. 

3 Recherche de la veritc, II, 79. 



1 8 PLEASURE. IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

may obtain this that God has given us pleasures and pains. So pleasures 
and pains are not of value merely as such, but because through them we 
discern and desire perfection. In order to lead us to desire to share in 
this order, God has given us certain tendencies, all of which, when suc- 
cessful, produce in us feelings of pleasure. These are: (1) curiosity; 
(2) self-love; (3) benevolence. 1 Self-love divides itself into two parts — 
the love of one's enlargement or perfection, and the love of pleasure and 
happiness. The two should be in harmony. The contemplation of per- 
fection evokes a pleasurable response. The blessed love divine perfec- 
tions, God as he is, because the view of these perfections pleases them. 
"For, man having been made to know and love God, it is necessary that 
the sight of all that is perfect affords pleasure to us." 2 Besides these 
natural inclinations, we also have passions, which are also instruments 
to prompt us in the right direction, when properly employed. To the 
passions, which are due to bodily origin, as well as to the body and its 
pleasures in general, Malebranche, however, does not make as liberal con- 
cessions as Descartes. 3 

The naivete of Malebranche 's thought is evidenced by his ability to 
make rational self-love and benevolence both innate springs in the nature 
of man, and yet seemingly feel no problem as to their reconciliation. The 
fact that he does not use a mathematical mode of exposition gave him 
freer play than others of the school, and enabled him to give pleasure 
and feeling a larger part in perfection than he otherwise could have 
done. No sharp antithesis between pleasure and duty could arise in the 
mind of a man who regarded the consciousness of both to be due to the 
direct and immediate activity of God ! His free mode of exposition and 
wide sympathies give him a wider vision and a deeper recognition of 
the claims of pleasure, feeling, and happiness than any other of his 
school. In freely recognizing the worth of both physical and intellectual 
pleasures, and in making pleasure the spring to action and a factor in the 
discernment of good and evil, as well as in his recognition of the pleas- 
ures of both self-love and benevolence, this comprehensiveness is evidenced. 
On the other hand, he failed to appreciate the difficulties that a recognition 
of these elements elicits, probably on account of the inevitable obscurantism 
which seems ever to be the fate of philosophy when it is employed as an 
instrument for the statement and expression of religious doctrines. 

Failure to choose good and do right, and thus attain perfection, is not, 
however, due to wrong feelings, but to lack of intellectual discernment. 

1 Recherche de la verite, II, Book IV. 2 Ibid., II, 40. 

3 Henri Joly, Malebranche, 266 ff. 



THE PERFECTIONISTS 19 

This occurs when we fail to perceive that God is the cause of our pleasures, 
and are thus led to seek pleasure as something immediately obtainable 
by us upon our own responsibility, instead of being something for which 
we must depend upon God. Under such circumstances self-love becomes 
the irreconcilable enemy of perfection and virtue. 1 Self-love, the desire 
to be happy, is characteristic of saints and sinners alike; the difference 
simply is that the former see where it truly lies, while the latter seek after 
phantasms. 2 A peculiar application of the doctrine of occasionalism 
occurs where Malebranche says that it is an act of injustice for us to produce 
movements in the body which force God, acting according to the universal 
laws of nature, to give us pleasures where they are not consonant with 
the divine order, and we do not deserve them. Such action on our part 
must inevitably expose us ultimately to his punishment. 3 

Reason is the guide which directs us in the search of true pleasures 
and leads us to God. It is reason which enables us to "see all things in 
God," as their efficient cause and support. In the discernment of perfec- 
tion, both reason and feelings seem to co-operate. Reason discovers the 
good for us, and pleasure enables us to recognize it as such, and to enjoy 
and desire it. 4 Any well-worked-out account of the functional relationship 
between thought and feeling either in reasoning or in volition we, of course, 
cannot find in Malebranche; but we must credit him with considerable 
acuteness in perceiving that both processes in some way involve an inti- 
mate union of the two. 

As compared with Descartes, Malebranche makes the affective side 
rather more prominent. "Love" is a word which he is constantly using 
as the explanation of our actions, and by it he clearly means a sentiment, 
and not something so devoid of feeling as Spinoza's "intellectual love of 
God." Both Malebranche and Descartes, of course, have the same 
general attitude toward mind and body. The mind is more perfect than 
the body, and shares in the divine perfection to at least a larger extent. 
Both regard the passions as the source of confused ideas; and both look 
to the reason to enable us to avoid the mistakes into which they are liable 
to lead us. Both adopt the same psychological and physiological expla- 
nation for this. Descartes makes the perfection of the body rather a 
larger content of perfection as a whole than does Malebranche, as has 
already been noted; but Malebranche makes love and the more refined 

1 Traite de morale, 30, 72. 2 Traite, 263. 

3 Recherche de la verite, II, 76; cf. also Janet and Seailles, History of the Prob- 
lems of Philosophy, English trans., II, 289. 

4 Traite, 21 and footnote 6, 45. 



2 o PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

spiritual pleasures much more prominent 'in his account than does Des- 
cartes. He recognizes fully as large a social content in morality as does 
Descartes, and has an explanation for this in making benevolence one 
of the fundamental principles of our nature. He is also less friendly to 
Stoicism than Descartes. 1 

As compared with Descartes, we find Malebranche equally appre- 
ciative of the moral claims of our fellow-men upon us. To Malebranche, 
however, the measure of moral value is chiefly religious. He distinguishes 
two kinds of society: a society devoted to the attainment of transient 
and perishable goods, and one " governed by reason, sustained by faith, 
subsisting in the communion of true goods, whose object is a blessed life 
for eternity." 2 Beatitude is distinctly social in its nature. The heavenly 
Jerusalem is a city, and its joys are to be shared with the saints and the 
blessed Trinity. Malebranche 's conception of "seeing all things in God" 
is not sufficiently pantheistic to preclude a social state in which a com- 
munity of free spirits are united in mutual love with one another and 
with the Deity. 

In Malebranche 's presentation, then, we have largely the same defi- 
nitions of pleasure and beatitude as in Descartes. These, however, are 
less sensuous and more intellectual and religious in their nature. Though 
widely conscious of the social nature of happiness and duty, Malebranche 
insists upon making the thought of a future state of eternal blessedness 
the final standard by which to govern ourselves in all our social relation- 
ships. 

c. SPINOZA 

Malebranche, as we have seen, was interested in securing in ration- 
alism a medium for the expression of the doctrines of his church. He 
also seems to have been a man with broad sympathies, and was ready to 
allot a considerable content to feeling in human activity, so far as the 
method of his treatment admitted — and he did not adopt a rigidly mathe- 
matical mode of exposition. It is in Spinoza that we find the mathemati- 
cal method carried to its farthest development. In his case rationalism 
was the first interest: he had no religious afiiliations which were dear 
to him, and, as a member of a despised and persecuted race, living a com- 
paratively solitary life, it is not strange that he did not feel so strong social 
sentiments; so neither of these considerations influenced him in opposition 
to the general tendency of the school to reduce all the contents of conscious- 
ness to cognitive terms and to deduce their conclusions in mathematical 
fashion. 

1 Recherche de la verite, Book IV, chap. x. a Traite, 184. 



THE PERFECTIONISTS 21 

It is not difficult for psychologists to unite either thought or feeling 
with volition, making one continuous process out of the two, provided the 
remaining factor is ignored. It is when the attempt is made to fuse all 
three into one process that the difficulties arise. Consequently, Spinoza 
found little difficulty in proclaiming that "will and understanding are the 
same;" 1 but, as we shall see, it was not so easy for him to regard feelings 
as nothing other than confused thought. 

Pleasure and pain have to arise in consciousness as peculiar forms of 
cognition. Logically deducible from the definition of a thing is its conatus 
sui perserverandi, its endeavor to persist in its own being. But since all 
finite beings have this endeavor, and at the same time are finite, and not 
self-sufficient, they impinge upon one another in the assertion of their 
conatus, and each is necessarily determined at times in its action by causes 
lying outside of its own essence, and is passive. Now, perfection for 
Spinoza means enlargement or persistence in one's own being. 2 Changes 
in the condition of our conatus attract our attention. We are conscious 
of an increase in perfection as pleasure, and of the reverse as pain. The 
consciousness of the conatus itself persisting as further activity, and guided 
in its direction by pleasure or pain, is desire. From these three — pleasure, 
pain, and desire — Spinoza proceeds to account for our entire affective 
nature, as combinations of these with various cognitive elements. 3 

Spinoza thus makes a double abstraction. He abstracts the agreeable 
element out of our various feelings, and assumes that this is all that is 
unique and distinctive about them. He further assumes that this agreeable 
(or disagreeable) phase is simply a cognition. He recognizes nothing in 
pleasure and pain but a kind of cognition, and he recognizes nothing in 
the various emotions and sentiments but the fusion of pleasure and pain 
with images and ideas. 

When the mind is active, it always experiences pleasure, since it is 
always striving for its own enlargement and perfection. It may also 
receive pleasure when it is passive, since the effects of external stimula- 
tion may happen to be in accordance with its welfare.* Furthermore, 
the reason itself may evoke emotion, and seems to do so in earning its 
dictates into action, at least part of the time. 5 

1 Ethica, II, xlix, Cor. 2 Ethica, IV, viii. 

3 Love, for instance, is pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause. 
(Ethica, III, xiii, Cor.) 

4 Ethica, III, lviii, lix. 

s In this we are reminded somewhat of Kant's employment of reverence as an 
emotion induced by the action of the reason. 



22 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

The positive value of pleasure and emotion, according to Spinoza's 
account, seems then to be to indicate the direction of advancement toward 
perfection, and thus guide the conatus in its activity. They are thus at 
the same time cognitive and volitional — two terms which mean the same 
with him. There is nothing unique or distinctive about feeling, as com- 
pared with thought. It is distinguished from it only by being confused, 
while pure thought is clear and distinct. Thus feeling is a mark of imper- 
fection and finiteness. 

The ideal condition in a universe conceived in geometrical terms 
must, of course, be static. So we are not surprised to find that Spinoza's 
beatitude is a state of absolute rest. In attaining this bliss one must, 
of course, be active, and successively pass to higher states of perfection. 
During this transition one must, of course, experience pleasures. But 
as one advances higher into the ether, we should expect that one 's pleasures 
would become more refined, more intellectual, more clear and distinct, 
and less confused. Finally, when the realm of beatitude is reached, 
we should expect one's feeling of pleasure to be altogether dissolved in 
the clear, cold light of reason. Along the line of Spinoza's argument, 
this is the logical conclusion. Beatitude and the intellectual love of God 
ought to be absolutely devoid of any affective content whatsoever. 

But Spinoza was not a sufficiently bloodless man to be consistent with 
this logical conclusion of his argument. In his description of the blessed 
state expressions slip in which have a very suspicious emotional warmth. 
Even to God himself this impious logician ascribes clearly affective ele- 
ments — confused thoughts! 1 

That there can be little social content to morality or any high conception 
of duty in such a system inevitably follows. The Political Treatise sets 
out to demonstrate all social content from the principle of self-preservation 
and enlargement. The only duty that one owes to society is to look out 
for one's self, and the pantheistic conceptions simply serve as a support 
to reinforce one in this determination. 2 His mysticism, so far as he has 
applied it to conduct, is only in the inductive phase, where one abstracts 
oneself from everything in the way of social obligations to lose one 's identity 
in God, rather than in the later, deductive phase, where one loves all the 

1 E. g., in Ethica V, xxxv, the term gaudet, and in xxxvi, laetitia, are used in 
reference to God, though in the latter case with an apology. In xlii the mind rejoices 
{gaudet) when in the state of beatitude, and its "calm acquiescence" suggests rather 
a state of pleasant repose, than one of pure thought, absolutely devoid of feeling. 

2 Where Spinoza mentions benevolence and gratitude among the emotions, it 
is clear from the references which he gives that he does not regard them as at all dis- 
interested. {Ethica, III, xxxiv, xxxv.) 



THE PERFECTIONISTS 23 

creation as identical with one in God. 1 To be sure, the content which 
Spinoza attempts to deduce from his premises geometrically is larger 
than his logic will admit of, and the system breaks down here, just as it 
does in his treatment of beatitude. 2 My point simply is that, so far as 
Spinoza is true to his method — and he aims to be true to it throughout — 
his attempt to reduce feeling to cognitive terms results in the exclusion of 
all but purely egoistic considerations in morals. Identification of one's 
self with God is not egoistic in one sense, but in another sense it is the 
quintessence of egoism. And it is in the way that ignores duties to others, 
because of one's identity with God, that Spinoza's system works out. 

Beatitude, therefore, at the close of the Ethics, seems to be wholly 
an individualistic affair. It is as attainable by a Simeon Stylites sitting upon 
his pillar, as by a Francis of Assisi busied with labor for his fellow-men. 
The beatitude of Malebranche, as we have seen, is of a distinctly social 
character. That at the close of Spinoza's Ethics is entirely individual- 
istic. There is nothing in the conception to suggest that the presence of 
others is necessary for its enjoyment. 

In Spinoza's account we find pleasure and feeling described in purely 
cognitive terms, as confused thought. They are valuable guides to action 
in the attainment of perfection, but when this state has been reached, the 
logic of the mathematical method requires that beatitude be described 
as wholly intellectual, and quite devoid of affective contents. Such a 
beatitude is distinctly individualistic in character, and in this respect 
furnishes a sharp contrast to the thought of Descartes and Malebranche. 

D, LEIBNIZ 

Leibniz was more of a man of affairs than any of his predecessors in 
the perfectionist school, and in some respects his presentation of pleasure 
and happiness represents a distinctly more modern spirit. On the other 
hand, the narrowing tendency of rationalism has advanced farther with 
him in some ways than with Descartes and Malebranche. His freer 
method of exposition and wider outlook upon life kept his presentation from 

1 Cf. Paul Hermant, "Les Mystiques," Revue de synthase historique, June, 1905 
(end). 

2 E. g., when he says that every man that follows virtue will desire others to have 
the same good that he himself possesses {Ethics, IV, xxxvii), that he will render back 
to others love and kindness for hatred and and contempt (xlvi), and that the love 
of God will be fostered in proportion as we conceive that a greater number of men 
are rejoicing in it (V, xx). Such passages lead us to see that Spinoza had a larger 
social sense than his logic admitted of; but the ideal described at the end of V is 
wholly individualistic. 



24 PLEASURE IN N ON -HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

being so narrow as that of Spinoza, but it evidences the inevitable result of 
setting up perfection as the moral ideal, and attempting to define pleasure, 
happiness, and the whole content of morality in terms of a single 
conception. 1 

Pleasure is described as the perception of some perfection. The 
perfection must have been sufficient to be notable, to afford pleasure, 
properly so called. 2 In the Nouveaux essais he seems to adopt the Pla- 
tonic idea that pleasure must always be preceded by antecedent pain, of 
which it is the relief. However, the antecedent pain may have been very 
faint, even petite, while the ensuing pleasure may be great and profound. 3 
In this fact, that we can experience great pleasure subsequent to only 
slight pain, we perceive the goodness and wisdom of the Creator. 

Here there seems to be an inconsistency in Leibniz' definition of pleas- 
ure. If pleasure arises only subsequent to preceding pain, how can the 
pleasure be greater than the antecedent pain ? An effect cannot be greater 
than its cause. In having recourse to the distinction between clear and 
confused ideas, complicated as it is in his case by the doctrine of petites 
perceptions, is not Leibniz obscuring the issue, and failing to see that if 
the pain is confused, the subsequent pleasure must be also ? Professor 
Dewey calls attention to this feature of Leibniz' doctrine of pleasure, and 
remarks that Leibniz, "accepting and emphasizing the very same fact 
that served Schopenhauer as a psychological base of pessimism, uses it 
as the foundation stone of optimism. "4 One is inclined to feel, however, 
that here Schopenhauer is justified rather than Leibniz, if we hold strictly 
to this definition of pleasure. 

Perhaps the best way to interpret Leibniz' doctrine of pleasure at this 
point, in order to reconcile it with the rest of his system, is to suppose 
that he regarded antecedent pain or uneasiness as necessary to initiate activ- 
ity; but that the activity, once begun, is pleasant not only as affording 
relief from antecedent pain, but also jor its own sake. In other words, 
we suppose that Leibniz recognized activity as pleasant, after it has once 
been initiated, although he held the Platonic view as to its origin. 

In the Nouveaux essais, at least, good and evil are very explicitly 

1 The chief sources from which we have to derive Leibniz' ethical views are 
occasional passages in the Nouveaux essais and a few fragments published by Ger- 
hardt in Vol. VII of his works. It is a matter of great regret that Leibniz never fully 
worked out his ethical system. 

2 1, e., petites perceptions are not pleasure {Works, V, 149; New Essays, English 
trans., 167.) The citations to the original are to the edition of Gerhardt. 

3 V, 151 f.; New Essays, trans., 170. 

4 Leibniz' New Essays — A Critical Exposition, 114. (Chicago, 1888.) 



THE PERFECTIONISTS 25 

defined in terms of pleasure and pain. 1 In this work, where Leibniz 
shows the influence of Locke, a number of statements sound very hedon- 
istic. These are not to be taken, however, as indicating a departure from 
his previous views, and those of his school in general. Descartes had said 
that pleasure and happiness are very closely connected with the highest 
good, and are the inducement that leads us to seek it; Malebranche made 
similar and even stronger statements; and Spinoza even made pleasure 
and pain determine the direction of our activity, and said that "we deem 
a thing good because we desire it," 2 but this simply meant with them 
that it is through pleasure and pain that we recognize perfection. Leibniz' 
thought is the same. The only difference is that he is inclined to have 
more confidence in pleasure and pain, and gives them perhaps more of 
a sensuous content — certainly, more than Malebranche. 

The reason why we do not always act in the direction of the highest 
good (perfection) and the greatest happiness, is that our ideas are confused. 
We reason in words without having the object clearly in mind. Our 
thoughts are not both clear and distinct. We often have to act hastily r 
without having time to think out the results of what we do, and so perceive 
the pleasure and pain (and hence the perfection) involved. We act in 
the way that affords immediate pleasure which we can perceive clearly and 
distinctly, and not in the direction in which our perception is confused , 
although greater pleasure (and perfection) lies in that way. The remedy 
is, of course, to think out a line of conduct clearly and distinctly, once for 
all, and habituate ourselves to act thus ever after, even though upon subse- 
quent occasions our thought may be confused. 3 Leibniz here offers an 
interesting contrast to Spinoza. With the latter, pleasure always is con- 
fused thought, which is to be reduced to the clear and distinct ideas of 
the reason and lose its affective characteristics; with Leibniz, thought is 
confused in thinking of an action, unless the pleasure involved in it is 
clearly and distinctly perceived. 

Happiness is defined as a condition of permanent pleasure. It is not 
a state of perpetual quietude, however, but one of unceasing activity. It 
is not eternal in the sense that a logical abstraction is eternal, being time- 
less; it is rather perpetual within the temporal series. It is not a sum of 
pleasures, but a continual progress to higher and ever higher stages of 
pleasure and perfection. One can never attain absolute perfection; 
that would be to lose one's identity in God. But this would be an impos- 

1 Works, V, 149; New Essays, trans., 167. 

3 Ethics, III, ix, note, xxxix, note; IV, viii. 

3 Works, V, 170-73, 193; New Essays, trans., 190-93, 216. 



26 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

sibility for Leibniz, not merely because he wished to remain orthodox, 
but because it would contradict the essential principles of his system for 
two monads to lose their identity and become one monad. 1 

Leibniz ' view of beatitude thus seems to be quite in accordance with his 
monadology in that it preserves individualism, and with his theology as 
well. We cannot, therefore, agree with Mr. Russell that, except in order 
to be orthodox, his ethics (at least so far as concerns our problem) would 
have been similar to Spinoza's. 2 Professor JodPs charge that his ethics, 
as it is, is too similar for consistency with the rest of his thought, seems to 
me more justified. 3 The explanation simply is that Leibniz had not 
fully worked out his own thought, and was naturally influenced by the most 
complete ethical exposition of the rationalistic school. 

As an account of individual development, Leibniz ' account of pleasure, 
happiness, and perfection appeals to one very strongly. His moral goal 
is a state of activity, such as one would expect an active man of the world 
to present. It is filled with more of the spirit of our own age and nation 
than the ideal of any other rationalist. Its deficiency comes in that there 
is no place in it that is very prominent for duty to occupy, nor the social 
demands that others have a right to make upon us, except so far as they 
coincide with the interests of our own happiness and development. The 
account is also naive in failing to perceive any opposition between pleasure 
and perfection. 

Its social deficiencies are not so great as they logically might be expected 
to be, for one reason. Leibniz, in his description of the perfection which 
affords pleasure, makes a certain place for the pleasures of a social sort 
by saying that the perfection which affords pleasure may be that of another, 
as well as one's own, or even, he adds, the perfection of a lifeless pro- 
duction, such as a painting or other work of art. 4 The inadequacy of 
such a treatment of social sentiments upon the one hand, and its incon- 
sistency with perfectionism as a whole, were not observed by Wolff, 
but later furnished a problem for Mendelssohn. 

E. WOLFF 

Wolff is largely a follower of Leibniz. His fuller exposition and 
lucid style, however, made his writings popular, and his use of the mathe- 
matical method caused his presentation to be definite, as well as complete. 

* Works, V, i8of.; VII, 86; VI, 598 fif.; Mollat, Lesebuch zur Geschichte der 
Staatswissenschaft, 90. 

2 A Critical Examination 0} the Philosophy of Leibniz, 202. (London and Cam- 
bridge, 1900.) 

3 Geschichte der Ethik, I, 356 f. 4 Works, VII, 86. 



THE PERFECTIONISTS 27 

For these reasons his importance in the history of philosophy is perhaps 
greater than that to which any peculiar merit or originality would entitle 
him. The mathematical method leads in his case to the limitation of 
pleasure to confused ideas, as it did with Spinoza. It also causes the 
inconsistencies into which he falls to become quite obvious to the reader, 
and exposes the difficulties into which the school had fallen more patently 
than had been the case with any previous writer. In thus fully working 
out the rationalistic conception of perfectionism, Wolff revealed to later 
writers its weak points, and opened the way for new efforts at repairing 
and modifying it, until, after first making similar efforts, Kant finally 
erected a quite different and much more brilliant moral edifice. 

Wolff attributes to the soul as vis representative, an inherent tendency 
to change its condition in the direction of more perfect representation. 
For realizing this, it has two faculties — the cognitive and appetitive. The 
confused ideas of sensation, memory and imagination, together with the 
lower appetites which apprehend the good under confused ideas of pleasure 
and pain, go to make up the sensibility, and are opposed to the will with 
its clear and distinct, rational idea of the good, and the higher cognitive 
faculties which co-operate with it. 

Pleasure is the perception of some perfection. It is always confused. 1 
It seems, however, to be the necessary spring to action, at least upon the 
part of the sensibility. 2 He follows Leibniz in saying that the perfection 
perceived need not be one's own; it may be the perfection of a painting, 
a clock, another person; and the perception of God affords the highest 
pleasure of all. 3 Thus, as Sir William Hamilton has shown, pleasure 
with Wolff seems to be regarded as an attribute of the object. 4 In one 
respect this view of pleasure was profitable for ethical purposes. Pleasure 
upon this view did not have to be wholly selfish. There could be such a 
thing as disinterested pleasure. Thus a certain social content could be 
gotten into morality, even if it has to depend upon pleasure to some extent 
to initiate action, and regards happiness as the necessary reward of ethical 
action. This leaves room for the words oder anderer in the rational law 
of action: "Thue, was dich und deinen oder anderer Zustand vollkom- 

1 Psychologia Empirica, §536; cf. §511, end. Sometimes pleasure seems to 
be distinguished rather as an effect of this perception, but the distinction does not 
seem to be important and is not long maintained. Cf. Thun und Lassen, II, §40. 

2 Gott, Welt, Seek, etc., II, § 133. 

zGott, Welt, Seele, etc., II, §129; Thun und Lassen, §§678, 691; Philosophia 
Empirica, §§ 512 ff. 

4 Lectures on Metaphysics, II, 463. 



28 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

mender machet: unterlass, was ihn unvollkommender machet. "* Such 
a description of pleasure and feeling is, of course, lamentably deficient 
in leaving nothing by which the unique features of selfhood can be dis- 
tinguished. Any perfection affords pleasure, no matter whose. And all 
perfection seems to afford pleasure in the same way. Thus there is no 
ethical problem of egoism and altruism in Wolff, because the distinction 
between ego and alter is not made. Wolff's description of pleasure and 
feeling is the most abstract which we have to consider, for this reason. It 
not only abstracts the agreeable or disagreeable element out of feeling, and 
assumes that this is all there is to it; it also abstracts the subjective feature — 
the very characteristic that makes feeling unique and distinctive — and 
makes pleasure and pain be a part of objects perceived in much the same 
way that sound and color are projected into the object by common- 
sense. 

Pleasure serves two rather conflicting roles in Wolff's account: (i) it 
is confused thought, and apprehends imperfectly the perfection which 
the reason cognizes clearly and distinctly; (2) it is the constituent of 
which happiness is composed, and happiness is the reward of moral action. 
The whole moral problem arises from the confused nature of feeling, 
and the errors into which it leads us. 2 The remedy, of course, is to reduce 
the sensitive appetitus, the seat of pleasure and pain, into agreement with 
the rational appetitus, which is infallible. 3 Since the judgments of the 
sensibility are confused, and those of the reason infallible, it would seem 
to be desirable to reduce the former to terms of the latter, extinguish it, 
as much as may be, and see all things according to the light of the reason. 
This would have brought Wolff into substantial agreement with Spinoza. 
Pleasures and pains would be confused ideas; the clearer they become, 
the less pleasure there would be in them. And such is the thought in some 
places, 4 though never carried to its logical conclusions. On the other 
hand, he sometimes says that clearer rational discernment affords keener 
discrimination, and in this way affords the perception of new perfections, 
and so increases instead of diminishes pleasure. 5 

This last view seems more in accordance with his ruling thought, 
and with the view of beatitude, which he takes from Leibniz, which con- 

1 Thun und Lassen, §12; Philosophia Practica, Part I, chap, ii, esp. §§152, 
153, 188. 

2 Psychologia Empirica, §511. 

3 "A ratione nullus proficitur error" {ibid., §500). 

4 E. g., Gott, Welt, Seele, etc., II, § 132; Psychologia Empirica, §511 end, §536. 

5 Psychologia Empirica, §§ 530-32. 



THE PERFECTIONISTS 29 

sists in an uninterrupted progress in the attainment of new perfections, 
and not in a static condition of absolute perfection. 1 

Without attempting to solve, or perhaps even being conscious of, the 
inconsistencies in his account of pleasure and happiness, the moral ideal 
with which Wolf! leaves us is the perfection of all of our faculties, and to 
the extent to which this perfection is attained they will be found in perfect 
harmony. In this way his three definitions of happiness — condition of 
a permanent joy; perception of uninterrupted progress to higher per- 
fections; conformity to the laws of nature and reason — run together. 

It is hardly necessary to summarize the palpable inconsistencies in 
perfectionism which this, its final statement by Wolff, has really failed to 
overcome. In order to secure the co-ordination of pleasure, happiness, 
and moral obligation in terms of perfection, pleasure has not only been 
reduced to confused thought, but has lost its peculiar personal character, 
and become an attribute of objects. Morality is in the highest sense 
rational, and yet its performance is attended by pleasure, and its final 
reward is happiness. These difficulties led to a considerable modification 
of perfectionism by Mendelssohn, and to still more sweeping changes by 
Kant. But as these writers were influenced in these alterations largely 
by British writers, it will be necessary, before taking them up, to pass to 
the development in Great Britain. 

1 Philo sophia Practica, § 374; Thun und Lassen, § 44. 



III. THE BRITISH NON-HEDONISTS 

Several causes, chief among which was the more rapid growth of 
individualism, led British writers much more quickly to a recognition 
of the difficulties which oppose the reconciliation of pleasure and happi- 
ness with morality and duty, than was the case upon the continent. 

British writers, in giving more attention to man as an individual, came 
to attribute importance to what peculiarly distinguishes one man from 
another and seems uniquely his own — his impulses and feelings. Conse- 
quently, British treatises were occupied with ethical and psychological 
topics at a time when the interests of continental writers remained mainly 
metaphysical. 1 

Again, the continental mind is more given to conceptual thinking, 
cares more for logical consistency, is more doctrinaire; and so it naturally 
sought for, and found satisfaction in, such a concept as perfection. Having 
found their point of departure in a general concept, perfection, continen- 
tal writers sought to include within it the whole content of morality. They 
went on to define pleasure very explicitly as the perception of some per- 
fection, and happiness as consciousness of the possession of all the per- 
fection of which we are capable. While at the beginning of the movement, 
as we have seen, Descartes and Malebranche are largely conscious of 
social interests, rationalism, having once adopted the conception of 
perfection as the highest good, and gotten its logical method into efficient 
working order, refused to recognize either any social content as moral 
obligation that could not be deduced from perfection, or any pleasures 
as genuine which could not be subsumed under both it and happiness. 
The whole rationalistic tendency was therefore to narrow the limits of 
perfection, happiness, and pleasure, and none of these conceptions could 
develop very far. 

On the other hand, the Anglo-Saxon, whose whole disposition is more 
experimental, and who cares more for immediate "matters of fact" and 
"common-sense" than for logical deductions, followed the empirical 
method in ethics, as he has followed it mainly in his science, philosophy, 
and political government. The British writers did not give an explicit 
definition to pleasure. They assumed that everyone knows what pleasure 

1 While Malebranche and Spinoza both wrote treatises upon ethics, their exposi- 
tions are respectively governed by religious and metaphysical rather than psycho- 
logical considerations. 

3° . 



THE BRITISH NON-HEDONISTS 31 

is; and, while this assumption caused their work to lack precision, it 
afforded their thought entire freedom of development. As they cared little 
for concepts, we do not read much in their writings of ''perfection" after 
the time of Cumberland. Starting, instead, from immediate sense-expe- 
rience, they were free to discover inductively whatever varieties of pleasure, 
happiness, and moral obligation lay in their way. With their thought 
thus afforded free expansion in all directions, they soon came upon a 
serious opposition. 

After the English nation refused any longer to regard the church as 
the arbiter and interpreter of right and wrong, the more conservative of 
its moral philosophers fell back upon the Stoic conception of natural 
law, which, they thought, would make moral principles at the same time 
rational, and not less eternal and immutable than God himself. Such 
morality was believed at the same time to be existent in the very nature 
of the universe, and to afford to the individual, then coming to self-con- 
ciousness, means for the highest realization of his powers and capacities. 
The social content of this morality was gradually becoming widened, in 
consequence in part, no doubt, of the nature of the political government, 
which, if not popular, still afforded some opportunity for the expression 
of public opinion, especially upon the part of the classes of society to which 
the ethical writers of the period belonged. Political privileges awakened 
in some measure feelings of public responsibility. Again, the whole 
genius of Calvinism, usually the faith of churchman and dissenter alike, 
tended to emphasize the idea of duty, and to strengthen social sanctions, 
in a way. In consequence of these tendencies, morality had acquired a 
larger content in Great Britain, and was felt to be more authoritative, 
at least by some of her citizens, than was the case upon the continent. 

And, though the eighteenth century in some respects represents a 
lapse from the rigorous sense of duty found in the preceding century, 
still the idea of the personal character of moral responsibility must have 
persisted, and the widened social sense of the later century must have 
impelled a wider extension of the content of this duty. On the other 
hand, the constantly growing sense, both of the worth and of the motive 
power of the individual's own feelings and impulses, was inevitably 
opposed to the idea of compelling him to submit to the external authority 
of a traditional morality. 

When British ethical theorists were thus confronted with the apparent 
opposition between this traditional morality, which had boon regarded 
in the past as eternal and immutable, and which now had a widened social 
content, and the newly discovered individual, with his impulses and 



32 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

feelings which were thought of as the necessary springs to his action, 
they had to choose between two alternatives: (i) The old moral content 
might be frankly thrown overboard, and a new start made, deriving the 
content of all morality, which should continue to be regarded as genuine, 
from the impulses and feelings of the individual (which usually meant, 
from his egoistic pains and pleasures). (2) The attempt might be made 
to show that the conventional morality, though no longer justifiable on 
the old arguments, was after all in accordance with the impulses and 
desires of the individual, and would afford him more satisfaction and 
pleasure than any other line of conduct possibly could do. 

The second alternative was, of course, the one adopted by the more 
conservative thinkers, and it is in this way that we are to interpret the 
work of Shaftesbury and his successors. The mode of treatment developed 
into two lines of thought which are to be distinguished : A. The widening 
of the conception of pleasure by finding new sources and kinds of pleasure, 
such as the pleasures of the moral sense and of sympathy, in order to 
effect a reconciliation between the demands of happiness and those of 
morality. This line of thought concedes that men will not act morally 
unless they perceive that such action is in the interests of their own happi- 
ness, and seeks, by the introduction of additional pleasures, to prove 
that this is the case. B. A critical examination of human actions, which 
went to show that rational self-love, or the desire for happiness, is not a 
primal impulse in man's nature, but rather a regulative principle for 
the direction of impulses which do not always agree with it. At first — 
e. g., with Butler — this was not used to question the necessity that delib- 
erate action must be in the interests of pleasure and happiness, but merely 
to admit of other regulative principles, such as conscience and benevo- 
lence, provided these can be shown to be surer means of gaining happiness 
than the direct pursuit of it by self-love. The aim was thus to minimize 
the divergence between self-love and morality, and present philosophical 
arguments to show their ultimate coincidence in the cases where the imme- 
diate divergence cannot be overcome. Later, however, the question 
arises whether even rational action must be in the interests of self-love. 
Price thinks that, when the reason has become more fully developed, it 
will be able to initiate action on its own account; and Brown concludes 
that moral excellence is a stronger motive in man, even as he is consti- 
tuted at present, than personal pleasure. 

A noteworthy feature of both movements is that happiness is always 
assumed to be made up of pleasures. There is no attempt to substitute 
a refined or intellectualized happiness, distinguished from ordinary happi- 



THE BRITISH NON-HEDONISTS 33 

ness as blessedness or beatitude, such as we find among both rational- 
istic and idealistic writers upon the continent. Happiness is a sum of 
pleasures, or a state of continuous pleasurable enjoyment. They never 
thought, before the time of Whewell, of defining happiness except in terms 
of pleasure. Their whole effort, instead, was either to discover new kinds 
of pleasure, or, finally, to question whether pleasure is, after all, the sole 
motive to action. 

A. THE ATTEMPTS TO SAVE MORALITY BY WIDENING THE CON- 
CEPTION OF PLEASURE 

A. SHAFTESBURY 

Like Descartes, Shaftesbury's moral ideal is the perfection, or har- 
monious development and co-operation, of man's faculties. He differs 
from Descartes, however, in paying less attention to the intellectual side 
of our nature, and a great deal more attention to the feelings or affections. 
To secure a proper balance or co-ordination of these is both to secure 
our highest personal development and happiness, and at the same time 
to fulfil most completely our social obligations. 

He distinguishes three kinds of affections. Natural affections lead to 
the good of the public; self-affections lead only to the private good of the 
individual; unnatural affections, to neither. Natural affections are more 
necessary to private pleasure than are the self-affections themselves. We 
do not enjoy the latter unless they are mixed with the former; even the 
elemental pleasures of food, drink, and sex are not of much pleasure to 
us unless we conceive of someone else sharing them with us — else they 
would be unnatural, and would not even contribute to our own happiness. 

Now, there is in everyone an end to which everything in his constitu- 
tion must refer. It is with reference to this that his affections must be 
tested. If they afford him pleasures which aid him to realize this end, 
they are moral, and otherwise they are not so. 

To this end if anything, either in his appetites, passions or affections be not 
conducing, but the contrary; we must own it ill to him. And in this manner 
he is ill with respect to himself; as he certainly is, with respect to others of his kind, 
when any such appetites or passions make him in any way injurious to them. 
Now, if by the natural constitution of any rational creature, the same irregu- 
larities of appetite which make him ill to Others, make him ill also to himself; 
and if the same regularity of affection which causes him to be good in one sense, 
causes him to be good also in the other; then is that goodness by which he is 
useful to others a real good and advantage to himself. And thus virtue and 
interest may be found at last to agree. 1 

1 Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit, 44. 



34 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

One of the main theses of the essay is to show that this agreement 
between virtue and interest does take place. He concludes, in heavy 
type, that "to have the natural and good affections is to have the chief 
means and power of self-enjoyment ; v while "to want them is certain 
misery and ill." 1 

To secure a proper balance between the two good kinds of affections, 
and to suppress the third kind, is then the moral desideratum. To have 
the self-affections disproportionately strong is to lose the social pleasures; 
to have too strong benevolent impulses would, of course, be detrimental 
to society, if this proved detrimental to the individual's own welfare, 
and consequently his ultimate usefulness. 

As a sort of balance-wheel to regulate the affections, and give additional 
motivation to the effort to keep them properly co-ordinated, Shaftesbury 
introduces the moral sense. Without this, as Sidgwick observes, 2 a man 
would still find it to his interest to maintain the balance between the self- 
and the natural affections; but with it, one has an additional reason for 
doing so. The consciousness of this harmony or balance itself affords 
pleasure, and the absence of it affords pain. 

In this quasi-aesthetic manner Shaftesbury tries to give a more uni- 
versal principle of morality than individual pleasure. Its inadequacy, 
of course, is obvious enough. He has the same implicit faith that indi- 
vidual self-development, which the continental writers would have called 
perfection, and which he thinks of as an end toward which everything 
in our constitution must refer, entirely coincides with the attainment of 
pleasure and happiness. The difference is that he thinks of activity 
mainly in terms of feeling, and all his values are feeling values. He does 
not show the slightest tendency to reduce pleasure and feeling to cognitive 
terms. He also goes farther than the continental writers in his efforts 
to show that individual pleasures involve a social content, and that the 
duties which man owes to society are essential to his own pleasure. He 
thus has a keener appreciation of the social content of morality as fur- 
nishing a problem for ethics than had any of the perfectionists. Des- 
cartes and Malebranche, to be sure, have a large social sense ; but the 
reconciliation of social demands with those of the individual did not 
furnish them with a problem, as it did Shaftesbury. 

Such is Shaftesbury's easy reconciliation of perfection, social virtue, 
and individual pleasure and happiness. Himself a man of singularly 
genial temperament, he felt little conflict between duty and his own happi- 

1 Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit, 139. 

2 History of Ethics, 189. 



THE BRITISH N ON -HEDONISTS 35 

ness. His optimistic reconciliation, however, did not fail to meet with 
dispute upon the part of his contemporaries. Its weak points were 
exposed by Mandeville and others, in a trenchant manner. 1 

B. HUTCHESON 

Another attempt to find an adequate basis for morality by widening 
the conception of pleasure was made by Hutcheson, who developed the idea 
of a moral sense as a special faculty which has for its function the percep- 
tion of virtue and vice, and the feeling of pleasure or displeasure accom- 
panying the perception. At first, in his earliest work, the Inquiry, the 
moral sense functions in an appreciative manner. The pleasures which 
it affords are of an aesthetic sort; and, as Scott has pointed out, 2 since 
for Hutcheson beauty seems to mean order, regularity of spatial propor- 
tions, etc., rather than the sensuous pleasures of color, sound, etc., of 
which he had little appreciation, the morally good seems to afford about 
the same pleasure as does beauty. In his later works, notably the Pas- 
sions, and still more in his posthumous work, the Moral Philosophy, the 
moral sense comes to take on more of a cognitive and even rational nature, 
and to be less a matter of immediate intuition and feeling than was the 
case in the earlier work. The difference, however, is rather one of empha- 
sis, the present writer is inclined to think, than indicative of a radical 
change in his system of moral philosophy. 

The attitude to which Hutcheson throughout remains consistent 
is that pleasure of some sort is always the spring to action; and that virtue, 
or obedience to the moral sense, affords the most pleasure and happiness. 
The moral sense thus is the evaluating factor which appreciates moral 
values, and affords the greatest pleasure to us of any part of our nature. 

He has worked out a careful argument to prove this thesis in the Pas- 
sions, where he carefully distinguishes the different senses which we have, 
and compares the pleasures of each. He distinguishes five different 
kinds of senses, viz.: the external senses — sight, hearing, etc.; the " plea- 
sures of the imagination," which arise from regular, harmonious, and 
uniform objects, novelty, grandeur, etc.; the public sense, which gives 
a determination to be pleased at the happiness of others, and to be uneasy 
at their misery; the moral sense, by which we perceive virtue and Wee 
in ourselves and others; and the sense of honor, by which the approbation 
or gratitude of others is a necessary occasion of pleasure. The first two 

1 Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, I, 162 (Edin. ed. 1772). Cf. J. H. Tufts, The 
Individual and His Relation to Society in the British Ethics 0} the Eighteenth Century, 
Monograph Supplements of Psychological Review, VI, No. 2, p. 14. 

2 Francis Hutcheson, by W. R. Scott. 



36 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

of these senses are individual and selfish in their nature ; their gratification 
is the object of self-love, and they thus furnish interested pleasure. His 
argument proceeds carefully to compare and evaluate the pleasures 
originating from these five sources according to their intenseness and 
duration. He finds, following Shaftesbury, that the external senses afford 
little pleasure taken by themselves, unmixed with the pleasures really 
due to the higher senses. The intellectual pleasures due to the imagina- 
tion are much greater; but still decidedly inferior to those of the last 
three, which are the source of disinterested pleasures. 1 These last are not 
only superior to the others as regards their intenseness and duration, 
but are so much superior that they seem to be qualitatively different. 2 
One will endure the severest pains of the first two kinds of senses for the 
sake of these higher pleasures. 3 

In the treatment in the Passions the "public sense" and the " sense of 
honor" seem to be used to buttress the moral sense by affording additional 
sources of pleasure which reinforce the pleasures of the moral sense, with 
which they always seem to be in entire agreement, and thus more deci- 
sively throw the balance of pleasure and happiness in favor of morality, 
as over against the selfish claims of the pleasures which are the object 
of self-love. In the Moral Philosophy the principle of "calm benevo- 
lence" is used in the same way. It seems to be a principle entirely co- 
ordinate with the moral sense, directing action in the same directions, 
and affording additional motivation. 4 In the same manner, perfection 
is also employed, especially in the latter work, where the moral perfection 
of God and one's own perfection and excellence are sources of pleasure 
to one. 5 

Considerations of religion and the perfection which is associated 
with them in Hutcheson's mind are not introduced solely for the purpose 
of indicating additional kinds of pleasure. A morality founded upon the 
perceptions of a sense, and more especially upon the feelings of pleasure 
and pain which attend those perceptions, must necessarily lack any means 
of demonstration or justification other than its own presence in conscious- 
ness. There is no place for a universal standard in such a system. So 
Hutcheson is obliged to confess: "Everyone judges the affections of others 

1 With all of the writers discussed in this section, "disinterested" pleasures are 
pleasures of a social kind into which considerations of self-love do not enter. 

2 Passions, §§5, 6; esp. p. 158. Cf. Moral Philosophy, I, 62, 221 ff. 

3 Passions, 142. 

4 Cf. Sidgwick, History of Ethics, 201 f. 

5 Moral Philoso-bhy, I, chaps, ix, x. 



THE BRITISH NON-HEDONISTS 37 

by his own Sense, so that it seems not impossible that in these Senses men 
may differ as they do in taste." 1 In the Moral Philosophy he is led to 
the conclusion that the moral sense requires cultivation, like any other 
faculty. 2 Hutcheson was doubtless conscious that his system thus lacks 
a universal standard; and we must interpret the attempts to describe 
the moral sense as a faculty, to ascribe to it perfection and divine approval, 
and to make it, together with "calm benevolence," regulating factors 
which control the other impulses and feelings, as all attempts to ground 
morality more thoroughly than could be done upon the mere basis of 
sense-perception and feeling. 

However this may be, and however much the influence of Butler 
may have led him to the modification of his earlier presentation, in which 
the moral sense seemed to serve as an immediate touchstone by which 
right and wrong could be perceived without reflection, 3 the moral sense 
still remained a faculty analogous to the other senses with pleasure and 
pain attending its operations, and through these feelings right and wrong 
are recognized, while the reason is only the passive agent, carrying out 
the commands of the moral sense, 4 If errors occur, these are at least as 
likely to be due to erroneous judgment upon the part of the reason as to 
lack of refinement upon the part of the moral sense. 

Hutcheson 's system employed the conception of pleasure as the basis 
of moral values and spring to action in a broad, free, and discriminating 
manner. He is thus able to get a wide social content into morality. His 
treatment of the pleasures of benevolence and the moral sense suggests 
the modern conception of a social self, which is broader, as well as deeper 
and more genuine, than the narrow self of self-love. 5 

In his system we find pleasure, happiness, virtue, perfection, religion, 
and man's social and benevolent impulses working together in perfect 
harmony. The scheme has excluded purely individual pleasures where 
these are opposed to social good, and is unaware of any claims of duty, 
effort, or self-denial that do not afford pleasure and happiness to the agent, 
taking these last terms in their widened significance. 

Hutcheson differs from the rationalistic accounts in his recognition of 
a much wider social content of morality, and in a vastly larger and more 
discriminating account of pleasure and feeling in their moral aspects. 
Whereas the rationalists tried to make sense-perceptions and feelings 
subordinate to rational concepts, Hutcheson makes the moral sense domi- 

1 Passions, 234; cf. Scott, op. cit., 283. a Moral Philosophy, I, 5S-61. 

* I, 58-61. s Cf. J. H. Tufts, op. cit., p. 22. 

3 Inquiry, Tr. ii, § i, csp. p. 115. 



38 PLEASURE IN XOX-HEDOXISTIC SYSTEMS 

nate our nature, and regards the reason as an agent employed in earning 
out its commands. He excels them in his broader and more compre- 
hensive view of life; he is inferior to them in his lack of a basic rational 
principle which would furnish a logical and universally valid foundation 
for ethics, since they came much nearer to this, to say the least, than he 
did. 

C. HARTLEY 

Another attempt to effect the agreement of pleasure and morality by 
widening the conception of pleasure was made by Hartley. This he 
sought to do, not so much by seeking new sources and kinds of pleasure, 
as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson had done, as by giving an account of the 
origin of the different kinds of pleasure, which should go to show that 
social pleasures represent a higher state of development than do physical 
and purely individual pleasures. 

He follows Hutcheson in distinguishing different kinds of pleasure, 
each of which is referred to a " sense," and in arranging these senses in 
a hierarchy, with the moral sense supreme above the others. He differs 
from Hutcheson, however, in two important respects. With Hartley 
the physical pleasures and pains furnish the source from which all of the 
others are derived by the mechanism of association. Each sense is more 
complex than the one below it in the scale, and in general is a better medium 
for securing the lower type than the inferior one itself. 1 Each sense also 
affords derived pleasures of its own, which are more comprehensive, 
and afford pleasure and satisfaction to larger aspects of our nature, than 
the ones below it. The moral sense represents the most complete view 
of man's nature, embraces all the pleasures of the lower senses that can 
be consistently brought into harmony with one another and with it, and 
thus is the securest means of bringing happiness to the whole of our nature, 
including the future as well as the present. Self-love, which first seeks 
only the pleasures of the external senses and those of the imagination, 
when it becomes rationalized finds its own self annihilation in the moral 
sense and in the love of God, since in these the very pleasures at which 
it aims are most completely satisfied. 2 

Hartley's argument thus reinforces that of Hutcheson in a significant 
manner. Hutcheson could only compare the pleasures of the different 
senses with one another, and try to show that those of morality are greatest. 
Hartley makes the different senses grow out of each other, and shows 
that they all have a common end, man's happiness, and that their occa- 

1 Observations on Man, fourth ed. (London, 1830), II, 279 ff. 

2 Ibid., II, 282. 



THE BRITISH NON-HEDONISTS 39 

sional opposition is simply the opposition of a less highly co-ordinated 
group of pleasures to a more perfectly co-ordinated one. We are thus 
able to see why there is an opposition in the nature of man, since he is 
a developing being, and how it is to be overcome. 

Another important respect in which Hartley differs from Hutcheson 
is in viewing these various " senses" as merely combinations of pleasures 
and pains, which have to do wholly with the affective side of our nature. 1 
The moral sense as moral faculty, especially in Hutcheson 's later works, 
performs distinctly cognitive functions. It perceives good, and therefore 
experiences pleasure. While Hartley's presentation makes it clear that 
pleasures are the immediate springs to action, it is hard to decide just 
how the intellectual side of our nature combines with them in the moral 
act, and also how right and duty are discerned. When our action finally 
becomes perfectly subjected to the moral and religious senses through 
the principle of association, " duty will at last become a pleasure, and a 
person be made to love and hate merely because he ought. " 2 This makes 
it clear that duty and pleasure do not now perfectly coincide, and seems 
to suggest that duty must be apprehended cognitively, and not by the 
same manner that pleasure is experienced. He does not, however, explain 
how this is done, and so we are left in doubt as to what is his moral cri- 
terion or standard, how it is experienced, and how it co-operates with 
pleasure in the moral act. 

A conspicuous psychological error in Hartley's account is in regarding 
pleasure and pain as ideas of much the same nature as other ideas, 3 with 
which they can be associated in such a manner that a cognitive idea may 
be expected to be attended with the same affective idea whenever it is 
recalled. 4 

The attempt to derive the intellectual from the physical pleasures 
by means of the principle of association is not satisfactory; and he is 
scarcely more successful in showing how moral and social pleasures are 
derived from intellectual ones of an egoistic sort. In each case he is 
obliged to slip in a new content, of whose justification upon the basis of 
his method we do not feel fully convinced. In this respect Hartley's 
relation to succeeding development reminds us of Descartes. He is him- 
self conscious of a wide social and ethical content, but introduces a method 
that is not adequate enough to cover it. The result is that his successors, 

*Ibid., I, 98 f. 

3 Ibid., I, 497 f.; cf. II, 279 f. Although his treatment does not always scorn 
consistent with this position, these statements are very explicit. 
3 Ibid., I, pp. ii, iii. 4 Ibid., I, 82 f. 



40 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

who tried to use his method consistently, and to derive the whole content, 
both of morality and of pleasure, from simple sense-experiences, inevitably 
narrowed the content of each in a manner that both contradicts our intro- 
spection and overlooks a large part of our social duties and pleasures. 

D. HUME 

We find an illustration of the narrowing tendency of the principle of 
association when employed to deduce the principles of moral action from 
immediate impressions of pleasure and pain, in the works of a contempo- 
rary of Hartley — David Hume. 

In the Treatise the idea seems to be that the good is to be denned in 
terms of immediate impressions of pleasure and pain, and that practical 
ideas secure the vividness necessary to become impressions through "sym- 
pathy," just as the same takes place in the intellectual sphere through 
" custom" or "habit." In contrast to Hartley, sympathy is not due to 
a new combination of pleasures affording a higher and more spiritual 
form of pleasure than the physical feelings from which it has been derived. 
It is rather a process through which we feel the same immediate pleasures 
and pains that others about us feel, as the result of a sort of transference 
or contagion. 1 

Two objections to such a theory at once arise. First, it makes no 
qualitative distinction between purely personal pleasures and pains and 
those of sympathy. A parent may testify that his feelings have been as 
acute when he witnessed his child suffering intense physical pain as if 
he had suffered it himself; but he could hardly say that his feelings were 
exactly the same as those of his child. Similarly, one may sympathize 
with a young man whose fiancee, preferring a wealthier man, has suddenly 
jilted him; but one's feelings would not be identical with his, especially 
in the way one felt toward the lady. Secondly, such an account of sym- 
pathy as the one here described affords no more inducement to relieve 
the suffering of another person whose misery causes us to suffer through 
misery rather than simply to turn our attention to other channels and 
become oblivious of the cause of our suffering. 

It was doubtless from some sense of such difficulties as these that we 
find Hume, even in the Treatise, not always consistent with the theory 
that all moral and social impulses are the result of a sympathy that is 
simply a matter of affective imitation or contagion. The moral "pleases 
after a particular manner," 2 and goodness and benevolence are disin- 

i Treatise, Book II, Part I, § xi; cf. J. H. Tufts, op. tit., 38 f. 

2 Treatise, Book III, Part I, § ii; cf. Tufts, op. tit., 39 f. 



THE BRITISH NON-HEDONISTS 41 

terested. 1 In the Enquiry this change of attitude is much more marked. 
Passages are to be found in which the old view persists, but other passages 
suggest a quite different view. Sympathy is frequently described here 
as a distinct emotion or impulse, 2 furnishing pleasures of its own which 
do not need at all to be reduced to egoistic ones. In fact, the doctrine 
that all our desires are ultimately due to self-love is very strongly attacked. 3 

Hume thus came to regard the pleasures of sympathy, benevolence, 
and the moral sense as different in kind from our personal pleasures; 
and in this later position Hume may be classed among those non-hedonis- 
tic ethical writers who widened the conception of pleasure so as to include 
other content than the pleasures of self-love, in order to preserve its agree- 
ment with morality. 

Though the pleasures of sympathy thus seem to have assumed a 
uniqueness and qualitative superiority of their own, in Hume's mind, 
he never broke entirely free from the limitations which the conception 
of sympathy and the principle of association gave to the range of his ethical 
vision, and he is quite unaware of any duties which are not pleasures of 
some kind, or of any difference between social and moral demands. It 
is a striking fact that the most extreme of English empiricists is limited 
in his ethical treatment by the machinery of his method and his conception 
of sympathy in a way that in its logical effect reminds us more of the 
rationalists than does the system of any other British writer who comes 
within the range of this investigation. 

The attempt to derive moral conduct from simple pleasures and pains 
by means of the principles of sympathy and association is essentially an 
attempt to define morality in terms of a few conceptions, viz.: pleasures, 
happiness, sympathy, and association. These conceptions bear a fixed 
relationship to one another, and any content, to be recognized as moral, 
must comply with these requirements. While the logic of his method 
has a narrowing effect upon Hume's view of morality, he at the same 
time recognizes larger moral demands than he can get into his system. 
This is parallel in a striking manner to the situation among the rationalists. 
They had attempted to define pleasure and happiness, virtue and duty 
all in terms of perfection. This attempt inevitably led to a narrowing 
of moral content; and when the mathematical method was strictly fol- 
lowed, as in the case of Spinoza, the content to which morality is justified 
seems altogether inadequate, and other content is illogically slipped in. 

1 Treatise, Book III, Part III, § iii. 

2 Tufts, op. cit., 39 f.; Enquiry, 214 ff., 259, 271. 

3 Ibid., 266 ff. 



42 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

The rigorous employment of either rationalist or empiricist methods thus 
led to similar logical difficulties. 

E. ADAM SMITH 

A much more satisfactory ethical presentation of sympathy is made 
by this follower of Hume. He maintains, with a consistency wanting in 
Hume, that the sympathy which is the cause of moral sentiments is both 
wholly disinterested 1 and the largest source of pleasure which we have. 2 

In some respects Smith represents a genuine widening of morality 
beyond the bounds of any of his predecessors, inadequate as is the exclusive 
use of the conception of sympathy to explain all social and moral content. 
This is notably the case in his use of conscience, the sympathy of a supposed 
impartial spectator situated within our breasts, who regards all our actions 
with approval or disapprobation. The idea is a suggestive one, and has 
the effect of presenting the claims of duty and conscience, not only with 
greater force and vividness, but with greater sublimity, than perhaps 
is the case with any other writer who derives their content solely from 
feelings of disinterested pleasure. 3 

This large recognition of moral obligation is due to two reasons, the 
second of which is a consequence of the first. He recognizes moral and 
social pleasures as immediate, and so is not obliged to deduce them from 
the pleasures of self-love. Consequently, he is not obliged to explain so 
much of our moral sentiments by the principle of association, more of 
them being due to "immediate sense and feeling. " 4 In fact, the explicit 
use that he makes of association under the terms "custom" and "habit" 
is very little, being mainly to account for the absurdities of fashions and 
perverted moral tastes. 

The difficulties in such a presentation are, of course, obvious enough. 
Hume's empiricism, if fully worked out, is as disastrous in ethics as in 
epistemology. If all conduct is merely due to feelings — even though 
partly to disinterested ones — and morality is simply a matter of associa- 
tions fixed through custom and habit, it has no stability, and no way in 
which it can justify itself, the moment that it is called into question. The 
necessity of finding a firmer basis was felt by Hutcheson, who was led to 
attribute to his "moral faculty" cognitive and even rational functions, 
so far as he could without prejudice to his system as a whole; and the same 

1 1, e., not due to the pleasures of self-love. See p. 36 above, first footnote. 

2 Theory of Moral Sentiments, Part I, Sec. I, chaps, i and ii. 

3 E. g., the eloquent description of conscience in Part III, chap. iii. 

4 Ibid., Part VII, Sec. VII, chap. ii. 



THE BRITISH N ON -HEDONISTS 43 

need is implied in Smith's description of the "impartial spectator." The 
very idea of impartiality implies that one is not governed wholly by one 's 
feelings in one's decisions: and in referring conduct to the approval of 
such a spectator, Smith is unconsciously introducing a rational factor 
into the exercise of moral sentiments. It is only on account of this uncon- 
scious inconsistency that Smith can ascribe so much force and authority 
to the decisions of this unseen spectator. 

It is exactly this difficulty that led British non-hedonists to abandon 
the attempt to make morality coincident with a widened sense of pleasure, 
and to look instead, so long as they continued to regard pleasure as the 
necessary spring to action, for some rational principle which might guide 
and regulate our feelings of pleasure, and hence our actions. It is in 
this way that we are to interpret Butler and Price, no less than Kant. 

B. SYSTEMS REVEALING AN INCREASING DIVERGENCE BETWEEN 

MORALITY AND PLEASURE, AND A GRADUAL REPUDIATION 

OF PLEASURE AS EXCLUSIVE MOTIVE 

Long before all non-hedonistic writers had abandoned the attempts 
through the discovery of new and larger sources of moral pleasure to 
reconcile the old content of morality, believed by an earlier age to be the 
expression of the eternal laws of nature, with the pleasures of the indi- 
vidual which were thought to be the real motives to his action — another 
line of argument had made its appearance. 

The writers who took the new point of view recognized that, widen 
the conception of pleasure much as we may, its pathway does not imme- 
diately coincide with that of duty. They therefore sought to show that 
the way of pleasure is a winding course which leads nowhere, while that 
of duty actually reaches the goal of happiness which the followers of the 
other path seek in vain. This argument seeks to minimize the divergence 
between the two paths as much as possible in order to demonstrate that 
the way of duty leads in the direction which seems to be indicated by that 
of pleasure. At the same time the genuineness, or at least the exclusive- 
ness, of pleasure as the motive of human conduct becomes increasingly 
called into question. 

A. BUTLER 

In the Sermons Butler begins with a careful examination of human 
nature, in which he finds that we have a number of particular impulses 
and passions, and three regulative rational principles: self-love, which 
leads us to seek our own happiness; benevolence, which leads us to seek 
the happiness of others; and, supreme above all other principles, conscience. 



44 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

which embraces the whole of our nature and has a distinct authority 
of its own. 1 The decrees of conscience in regard to the content of moral 
obligation are therefore final; they express not only the highest laws of 
our own nature, but those of the universe, which are prior to the acts of 
God himself. 2 

But, authoritative as the voice of conscience is, the mere fact of its 
authority does not guarantee that it will be obeyed. Its voice must meet 
with a response in man's principles of motivation. Conscience seems 
rather to be a principle of moral discernment than an immediate spring 
to action. Its decrees must be proved to be in agreement with self-love 
before man will act upon them. 3 

A critical examination of self-love, however, reveals its deficiencies. 
It is not itself invariably acted upon. Man has a multitude of impulses 
and desires which are as likely as not to be opposed to his happiness. 4 
Moreover, the direct search for pleasure often defeats its own end — the 
well-known paradox of hedonism. 5 We thus discover: (i) self-love is not 
an invariable principle of action, since in unreflective moments (and most 
of our moments are not deliberate) we do not act upon it; (2) self-love 
is not an infallible guide even when followed, but often leads us astray. 
The next point is to show that self-love in the main leads to the same 
result as conscience, that in the diverging cases conscience is the safer guide, 
and that we have good reason to believe that through conscience we 
shall obtain the happiness which is the desire of self-love, but to which 
self-love cannot be depended on to lead us. This postulation of the final 
agreement of duty and happiness is defended by a lengthy argument in 
the Analogy. 6 

The immediate coincidence of pleasure and morality has thus been 
definitely abandoned. This affords a freer method, and one is able to 
discover new lines of duty and new kinds of pleasure, since the immediate 
identity of the two is no longer assumed. But the divergence must not 
be increased any more than can be helped; and the argument is always 
to show, wherever possible, that they really agree, since upon their usual 
agreement rests in large part the evidence for the final agreement of the 

1 It seems to me that Butler very clearly makes self-love inferior to conscience 
as regards moral authority, if indeed self-love can be said to have any authority at all. 
On the other hand, it is the necessary motive to action in cases of deliberation. Bernard 
{Sermons of Butler, note B) is therefore correct, as vs. Sidgwick {History of Ethics, 
196). 

2 Analogy, ed. by Bernard (London, 1900), p. 112; cf. note E, by Bernard. 

3 The famous "cool hour" passage, Sermon XI (p. 151 in Bernard's edition). 

4 Ibid., 139 f. 5 Ibid., 141. 6 Analogy, Part I, chap. iii. 



THE BRITISH N ON -HEDONISTS 45 

exceptional instances. Butler's exposition evokes our admiration on ac- 
count of his keen comprehension of the problem. He recognizes the 
divergence between duty and pleasure, and the ethical questions arising 
out of it, as no one else did, previous to Kant. He sees that the diver- 
gence cannot be overcome by the assumption of the pleasures of a moral 
sense, since such a treatment cannot furnish to morality the authority 
which is its due. 1 

There are, however, at least two serious difficulties which suggest 
themselves to the reader of Butler. First, the reconciliation of duty and 
happiness is effected only by means of a lengthy philosophical argument 
which the plain man cannot be expected to understand, although we can- 
not excuse him for that reason from the performance of his moral obliga- 
tions. Secondly, it is difficult to see why we have such a faculty as self- 
love at all. Why would not conscience, as supremely regulative principle, 
lead us to care for our own welfare as much as is our duty, without tempting 
us to go astray? In Hartley's account, which represents a much less 
advanced position in his retention of the moral-sense doctrine, we see 
an advantage here, at least. Hartley can explain the conflict as one between 
earlier and later effected co-ordinations. But Butler cannot explain the 
matter at all. These two considerations partly explain why, after the time 
of Butler, the old attempts to effect a reconciliation by means of a moral 
sense and moral sentiments continued. 

B. PRICE 

Price represents another step in the direction of intellectualizing moral 
conduct. Not only the recognition of the content and authority of morality, 
as with Butler, but also to a large extent its motivation, is due to the intel- 
lectual part of our nature, while pleasure and feeling occupy a distinctly 
subordinate position. 

Reviving the doctrine of Cudworth and Clarke, Price proclaims moral 
laws to be "rational," "immutable," "eternal," and "existing in the very 
nature of things;" and he further says that our intellect intuitively recog- 
nizes them to be such. 2 Since the moral rectitude of an action is absolute 
and unvarying, it is wholly different from pleasure and pain, which admit 
of variations. 3 "Morality is eternal and immutable. Right and wrong 
denote what actions are."* Thus far, pleasure and pain seem to be 
indeterminate phenomena which are capable of variations, and are of 

1 Sermons, Preface, p. 11. 

3 A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, 69, 158 f., 170, etc. 

3 Ibid., 70. 4 Ibid., 74; cf. p. 98. 



46 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

little moral worth. Action should be wholly discerned and motived by 
the intellect. And such is the ideal state, with Price. 1 Unfortunately, 
however, the human reason is still in its infancy, and is too weak of itself 
always to enforce its injunctions. It can do so to some extent, to be sure, 
and as man advances, its ability increases, and the assistance of feelings 
is rendered unnecessary. 2 

At present, however, the reason needs to be reinforced by "instinctive 
determinations." 3 These are largely, though not wholly, impulses of 
pleasure and pain. Following Butler, he shows that many of our impulses 
are as much opposed to individual happiness as they are to morality. 4 But, 
in the main, he looks to feelings of pleasure to reinforce the intuitive per- 
ceptions of the intellect. It is a wise provision of Providence, on account 
of the weakness of our reason, to cause our moral perceptions to be accom- 
panied by feelings of pleasure. We cannot perceive moral order or virtue 
without feelings of pleasure and approbation, nor the reverse without 
the opposite feelings. 5 Moral self-approbation is the largest source of 
our private happiness. 6 Consequently, in human beings moral action 
is a result both of an intellectual perception and of a feeling of pleasure, 
and it is difficult to decide which influence actually is the more decisive. 7 

To give us confidence in the affective reinforcement of moral motives, 
Price goes on to assure us that the desire for pleasure and aversion to pain 
also "exist in the very nature of things," and no power whatever can 
prevent a creature from desiring his own happiness. 8 This laudation of 
pleasure and happiness is hardly in accord with his original depreca- 
tion of the feelings in morality, but it seems clear that he wishes to give 
the feelings a functional part in reinforcing the moral intuitions and 
judgments of the intellect. In doing this, he fails to make a clear 
psychological distinction between the work of intellect and that of feeling. 
Both seem to aid to some extent in moral perceptions, and both seem to 
have some degree of motive power. 

Price's account doubtless seemed to give to morality a more substan- 
tial foundation than that of Butler, which rested it upon a rational faculty. 
It is instead asserted to be perceived intuitively to exist in the very nature 
of objective reality, and thus has greater necessity and unqualified validity. 
It is no longer dependent upon feeling for all of its motivation. The 
weakness in the account, of course, is that the intuitionist had no answer 

1 A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, 315, 339. 

2 Ibid., 121 f. 5 Ibid., 90 f. ? Ibid., 95-97. 

3 Ibid., 95 f. 6 Ibid., 92. 8 Ibid., no. 

4 Ibid., 1 1 8-2 1. 



THE BRITISH NON-HEDONISTS 47 

for the man who steadfastly denies that he has any such intuitions of an 
eternal and immutable morality, or gives wrong content to it; whereas 
Butler could meet such a man with rational arguments. 

C. REID 

Reid's attention was mainly given to the intellectual and volitional 
aspects of consciousness. Our problem was not prominent in his mind, 
and what little space we find devoted to it indicates slight advance upon 
the arguments of Butler. Besides numerous impulses and instincts (in 
the analysis of which in fuller detail he represents a genuine advance), 
he distinguishes two regulative principles governing conduct — duty, and 
the desire for one's "good on the whole." This latter consists of happi- 
ness and perfection. By perfection, however, he seems to mean nothing 
very different from happiness, so far as we can judge from his illustrations, 
and it seems safe to conclude that the desire for good on the whole is prac- 
tically synonymous with Butler's self-love. 1 This with Reid also is an 
inevitable spring of action, and the argument goes to show that it can 
be most surely obtained by obedience to duty. 

The advantages in favor of this course are similar to those mentioned 
by Butler. The road to duty is plain, while that to happiness is "dark 
and intricate, full of snares and dangers, and therefore not to be trodden 
without fear, and care, and perplexity." 2 Another point in favor of 
duty is the old idea of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson of the pleasures of the 
moral sense. The sight of others performing their duty affords us pleasure, 
while the highest pleasure of all is consciousness of good conduct in our- 
selves, which is the occasion of the most intense and permanent happiness 
of any thing in the world. 3 In Reid, however, we perhaps have a stronger 
feeling of the authority and extent of duty than had hitherto been expressed, 
and a more painful consciousness of the dilemma which must face a man 
until he has become convinced that duty coincides with his good upon the 
whole, and that this latter can be obtained through it. 4 

1 Cf. Sidgwick, History of Ethics, 228. 

2 Essays on the Active Powers (ed. 1788), 226. 

3 Ibid., 248. 

4 Beattie, whose Elements of Moral Science appeared two years after Reid 's 
Essays on the Active Powers, employs a sort of deductive hedonism to prove the imme- 
diate coincidence of happiness and virtue. The pleasures of the moral sense excel 
all others in dignity, intensity, and durability, in being always obtainable ami most 
agreeable to our whole nature; and, therefore, happiness, or the most comprehensive 
gratification of which our propensities are capable, is identical with virtue. 



48 PLEASURE IN N ON -HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

D. DUGALD STEWART 

Stewart attributes the source of moral action to the moral faculty, 
which, though it can be improved by education and association, 1 he takes 
great pains to show is one of the original elements of our nature. For 
this reason he is free from the tendency to narrow the content of moral 
obligation which has been noted in the case of some other writers who 
employed the doctrine of association. He does not have to derive the 
whole material of duty from elements which are originally not moral. In 
moral judgments three elements are present: the perception of the act as 
right or wrong; a feeling of pleasure or pain, varying in degree according 
to the acuteness of our moral sensibility; and a perception of the merit 
or demerit of the agent (whether one's self or someone else). 2 

The prime spring to action must be found in the moral faculty itself. 
The very notion of virtue or duty implies obligation. 3 How the motive 
to action can arise directly from this moral judgment is, one supposes, 
explainable from the affective element present in it. This element is also 
reinforced by other principles which obviously contain feeling elements, 
of which he mentions five: a regard to character, sympathy, a sense of 
the ridiculous, taste, and self-love. But none of these may be permitted 
to usurp the supremacy of the moral faculty as the ruling motive to action; 
they must simply co-operate with it as subordinate incentives. 4 While 
admitting as unqualifiedly as Butler the supremacy of self-love as the 
necessary motive to action inseparable from our nature as rational and 
sensitive beings, 5 Stewart seeks in this way to show that there are large 
sources of pleasure attending moral action and reinforcing it. 

Stewart does not attempt to define pleasure, which he apparently 
regards as one of the unanalyzable elements of experience. Happiness 
has for its prerequisite "the general habit or state of mind that is necessary 
to lay a groundwork for every other enjoyment." This foundation, he 
attempts to show, is obtained by "doing our duty, with as little solicitude 
about the event, as is consistent with the weakness of humanity. " 6 This 
foundation being presupposed, "the sum of happiness enjoyed by an 
individual will be the degree in which he is able to secure the various 
pleasures belonging to our nature." 

In the enumeration of our duties, he makes it a duty to ourselves to 
seek our happiness, and this is subordinate only to our duties to God and 

1 Works, ed. by Hamilton (Edinburgh, 1877), VI, 235 ff. 

2 Ibid., VI, 24. 5 Ibid., VI, 212-14. 

3 Ibid., VI, 35 f., 41. * Ibid., VI, 102 f.; VII, 349. 

4 Ibid., VI, 35 t, 4i. 



THE BRITISH NON-HEDONISTS 49 

to our fellow-men, and to be followed whenever these other actions do not 
prohibit it. Stewart thus seeks to reduce in every way the divergence 
between duty and happiness. To a large extent it is a pleasure to do 
one 's duty, and a duty to seek one 's pleasure. But, minimize the differ- 
ences as much as he can, Stewart is obliged to admit that there is a wide 
margin of doubtful territory left, at least for the plain man, who cannot, 
by the mere guidance of common sense, unsupported by philosophical 
arguments, see the ultimate harmony between happiness and duty. 1 

Stewart thus represents some advance in insisting that the moral 
faculty must furnish the ruling motive in moral action; he also shows 
that the divergence between duty and happiness is less than might be 
generally supposed; but in the end, since he supposes that pleasure must 
be the inevitable end of action, the philosophical arguments of Butler 
become necessary to secure moral motivation. 

E. THOMAS BROWN 

An important advance in the line of development now under considera- 
tion was taken by Brown. As early as Butler, the initial springs to action 
were seen not to be immediately directed toward pleasure and happiness. 
But both Butler and the Scottish writers who had taken up his arguments 
had taken it for granted that when action is deliberate it must always 
be directed in the interests of the individual. Their problem had accord- 
ingly been to effect a reconciliation of morality with happiness, in order 
to secure its motivation. 

Brown, however, sees no reason to suppose that individual action is 
always directed by the desire for happiness, even when it is reflective. 
He distinguishes ten distinct desires in our nature, only one of which is 
directly for pleasure as such, and it is by no means the most important 
of the ten. 2 The realization of any of these other desires of course affords 
pleasure, but it is not for the sake of the pleasure that it is desired. Pleas- 
ure follows the expression of an emotion, instead of being its cause. 3 It 
is the very nature of our minds that some objects should appear to it 
immediately desirable, and in consequence pleasure arises from their 
attainment. 4 

In his psychology of ethics we must therefore credit Brown with a 
clearer discernment of the relationships of desire and pleasure than any 
of his predecessors. He frankly says that the very idea of pleasure and 

1 Ibid., VI, 21. 

2 Philosophy of Mind (Edinburgh ed., 185 1), III, 325 ff. 

3 Ibid., Ill, 345-50. 4 Ibid., Ill, 348. 



50 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

happiness almost involves their desire; 1 but he perceives this is rather 
because these expressions are the general descriptions of the objects which 
we desire, than because in the generality of cases we desire them for their 
own sakes. The fallacies of hedonism, which Butler had sufficiently 
exposed to show that pleasure is not the immediate object of impulsive 
desires, Brown seems to have developed far enough in his own mind to 
lead him to conclude that happiness is not the object of deliberate action, 
except so far as by it we merely mean the attainment of our ends. It is 
only on this supposition that we can interpret this concession to happiness, 
and at the same time his insistence that other considerations, such as 
moral excellence and our own self-approbation and that of God, are of 
more value to us than our own happiness, interpreting the last word in 
its usual British sense of a state of continuous pleasurable enjoyment. 2 

Brown is, accordingly, able to say frankly that duty and happiness, 
though they may ultimately coincide, owing to "the gratuitous goodness 
of Heaven," are yet, "with reference to our will or moral choice, distinct 
objects." 2 The argument of Butler, as we have seen, really afforded no 
refuge for the plain man, who could not follow the intricate argument of 
the Analogy, and become convinced that he would most surely obtain 
his happiness by obeying his conscience. Brown, on the other hand, 
frankly confesses that in the moral act these two considerations may be 
diametrically opposed, and yet the choice be made in the interests of 
moral excellence. 

At the same time, Brown freely recognizes that pleasure is a good, 
even for its own sake, and it is actually a duty to seek it when it does not 
conflict with higher moral claims. 3 But in the event when it does, his 
faith in human nature is sufficiently strong for him to believe that the 
decision will usually be made in the right direction. 

Brown, as well as Stewart, made a large use of the principle of asso- 
ciation in his psychology of ethics. An action is not only attended with 
the emotion which it originally excited, but also with emotions associated 
with the class of actions to which it belongs. Thus the fact that an action 
is unjust evokes a greater emotional response than the action in itself 
would effect. Association therefore increases the affective response in 
manners sometimes favorable to moral action, and sometimes in a manner 
that obscures and beclouds real moral issues. 4 Association does not, 
however, at all explain the origin of moral perceptions in the first place; 
these are due to as genuinely elemental constituents in our nature as any 

1 Op. cit., Ill, 340. 3 Ibid., XCIX, esp. 415, 472, 481. 

* Ibid., IV, 455. 4 Ibid., Ill, 518-21. 



THE BRITISH NON -HEDONISTS 51 

other kind of perceptions. This being the case, the result of associa- 
tionism in Brown is not at all to narrow the range of morality or weaken 
its authority. 

F. LATER INTUITIONISTS 

Mackintosh criticises Stewart and Reid for insisting upon the original 
nature of the moral faculty and conscience, and refusing to derive them 
by association. His own proposition so to derive them is not, however, 
ethically objectionable, as he does not wish to derive them from the pleas- 
ures of self-love, as Hartley had done, but to derive both alike from com- 
mon sources. The advantage that would be gained by this extension 
of association would be in the interests of simplicity, as it would not assume 
so many original constituents in the human mind. In this respect, with- 
out sacrificing any ethical advantage, Mackintosh seems to represent a 
spirit more in accordance with modern psychology, especially as his pres- 
entation of associationism is free from many of the crudenesses of his 
contemporaries. 1 

In some respects the two most eminent French exponents of intuition - 
ism seem to represent a position prior rather than subsequent to Brown. 
Cousin presents the same arguments as Reid and Stewart, though perhaps 
with a larger recognition of the importance of feeling in moral action, 
and with an assurance of the ultimate reward of moral action by happi- 
ness which has been fortified by an acquaintance with Kant. 2 Jouffroy 
Seems to believe in a closer identity between moral and pleasurable action ; 
he does not concede so large a divergence in this life, and is inclined to 
think that they can, usually at least, be shown to be immediately har- 
monious. 3 Both present the arguments with greater fervor and eloquence 
than the Scottish writers, and introduce aesthetic considerations more 
largely. 

British intuitionists after Brown no longer seek to reconcile moral 
obligations with the supposed demands of self-love. The claim that all 
our deliberate action is actuated by considerations of self-love is no longer 
admitted, and little positive use of pleasure is made by them. They 
usually analyze human conduct into a variety of impulses, propensions. 
affections, and other springs to action, in which feelings of pleasure and 
happiness are of course involved; but as these furnish neither the cri- 

1 Progress of Ethical Philosophy, ed. by Whewell, 238 f., 241-66; cf. Preface (by 
Whewell), xxxix ft. 

a Lectures on the True, the Beautiful, and the Uood, trans, by O. \Y. Wight, esp, 
255"S7» 262, 2 8i, 284, 296 ff. 

3 Melanges philoso plaques (Ed. Paris, 1866), csp. 284-Q3. 



52 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

terion nor motive to action, they are not of consequence for ethical pur- 
poses. Frequently, to be sure, the assertion is made that moral action 
affords the most happiness to man; but this serves simply as a sort of 
corollary to the main arguments. 

Whewell, to be sure, concedes that happiness must ultimately coincide 
with duty, in a way that at first reminds one of the old attitude; but we 
soon discover that the happiness of which he speaks is a general satis- 
faction of all our desires, and not a happiness of continued pleasurable 
enjoyment as such ; and so the term has no specific content that will enable 
it to serve either as motive or as criterion for moral action. 1 

Martineau, after the controversy between intuitionism and utilitari- 
anism had been waging for half a century, makes an interesting conces- 
sion. In his doctrine pleasure is made to be a consequence of the satis- 
faction of a propensity, and thus he can agree that a calculation of pleasures 
is a calculation of the consequences of actions. Moral approbation is 
not, of course, to be determined by an estimation of consequences, but 
by the comparative evaluation of propensities to action. He admits, 
however, that after the moral criterion for determining the right in an 
action has thus been applied, one must be guided by consequences in 
selecting the means for carrying out an act; and in the selection of means 
considerations of pleasure have a legitimate place. 2 He gives no illus- 
trations, and just how he intended the two principles to work together 
in practice it is hard to see. It seems to be a tacit confession that later 
intuitionism, in its complete ignoring of the position of pleasure in moral 
action, has been unable to work out the applications of its theory to imme- 
diate conduct satisfactorily, and that it must look to considerations of 
pleasure for assistance in selecting the materials upon which its propensions 
are to be exercised. 

1 Elements of Morality, 241. 

2 Types of Ethical Theory, II, 275. 



IV. MODIFIED PERFECTIONISM 

To the earlier perfectionists perfection was the summum bonum, as 
we have seen, and pleasure and happiness were defined in terms of per- 
fection. The mathematical method had been responsible to a considerable 
extent for preserving the harmony between these ideas, at the cost of 
arresting their further development. 

After the time of Wolff, however, new tendencies began to appear in 
Germany, due probably to the general movement of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. Individual happiness and welfare came to appear of more impor- 
tance to the minds of men; and if the sterner aspects of the age of Fred- 
erick the Great seem to have played the principal part in molding the 
thought and character of Kant, some of his contemporaries were more 
strongly affected by the hedonistic tendencies then prevalent in France 
and England. It was an age when too lofty ideals were no longer in 
vogue, when men cared more for material ease and enjoyment, and the 
assurance of these became a concern of importance. To be sure, this 
tendency was less strong in Germany than in France, but the altered 
attitude reveals itself in a milder way. It was a great age for psychological 
introspection; diaries, journals, and memoirs were abundant. ^Esthetics 
was a favorite field of inquiry, and the psychology of pleasure, especially 
upon the aesthetic side, received an amount of attention sharply in contrast 
with an earlier age. A prominent subject of interest in metaphysics was 
furnished by questions as to the assurance of God, freedom, and immortal- 
ity; this interest not being due to a taste for philosophical speculation 
as such, but on account of their bearing upon man's present well-being 
and future happiness. 

A. MENDELSSOHN 

Mendelssohn, as contrasted with Wolff, evidences this change in inter- 
est. Although still a perfectionist, maintaining theoretically the old com- 
bination of perfection, pleasure, and happiness, the center of gravity in 
his system has changed, and the feelings come in for the principal analy- 
sis. The implication is that, since feelings are perceptions of perfection, 
it is through their guidance that we are to look for perfection. Conse- 
quently, Mendelssohn does not approach ethics by the way of " rational 
thoughts," but by a direct study of the feelings and sensations. 

He corrects two important defects in W'olff's definition of pleasure 

53 



54 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

which had stood in the way of its more extended use for ethical purposes. 
Wolff had limited pleasure to confused concepts, and to the sensibility. 
Mendelssohn shows that pleasure attends clear concepts as well, and 
that the increased discrimination which reasoning affords furnishes in- 
creased pleasure, especially of an aesthetic sort. 1 Wolff had not distin- 
guished the subjective and objective elements present in pleasure. He 
apparently treated feelings of pleasure in much the same way as sensa- 
tions of color, light, and sound. These all have reference to something 
external, and so does pleasure. Mendelssohn, on the other hand, dis- 
tinguishes two elements in pleasure: (i) the pleasure of perceiving per- 
fection in the object; (2) the pleasure involved in one's personal perfec- 
tion; and, of course, pain in one's own imperfection. In perceiving a 
good, both kinds of pleasure are experienced, due to the excellence of 
the object and that of one 's own perceptual activity. But in the perception 
of an evil object pain is felt only in the first of these ways. The object 
is perceived to be imperfect; but the efficiency of one's mental activity 
in perceiving it affords one pleasure, and we should upon no account 
wish not to be able to perceive this imperfection. But if the imperfection 
is in one 's self, the evil perceived is altogether painful, and one had rather 
not have it than have it. 2 This separation of the subjective, personal 
side of perfection and pleasure is, of course, of supreme importance to a 
writer who wishes to employ the feelings as a guide in conduct. 

His study of Shaftesbury, which doubtless encouraged him to give 
increased prominence to feeling in moral action, also led him to notice the 
problem of the harmonization of self-love and benevolence. 3 The iden- 
tification of happiness and perfection has been so complete that he can 
say that happiness is the final aim of all our wishes. This desire for 
happiness is immediate in self-love, and mediate in our love for others. 
Self-love necessitates the love for others, since there can be no pleasure 
without an extrinsic object of enjoyment. 4 

Since this problem, serious for British ethics, is thus readily solved 
to his satisfaction, he devotes his attention mainly to a characteristic 
rationalistic problem, viz.: the proper co-ordination of the emotions 

1 Schriften (ed. Leipzig, 1843), I, 118 ff. 

2 Ibid., I, 239 f. 

3 Mendelssohn's relationship to English writers, as well as that of other writers 
with whom we have here to deal, is fully treated by G. Zart, Der Einfluss der engli- 
schen Philosophen auf die deutsche Philosophen des XVIII. Jahrhunderts. (Berlin, 
1881.) 

4 Schriften, III, 409. 



MODIFIED PERFECTIONISM 55 

with the reason. The latter discerns good clearly and distinctly, but the 
pleasure attending its operation often has not the force and vivacity which 
the emotions of the confused sensibility have. Reason is, to be sure, 
more convincing, but the sensibility is always with us, and presents a 
larger quantity of characteristics more quickly and forcibly. 1 The moral 
desideratum is therefore to dissolve feelings into rational inferences, and 
to make sentient the operations of the reason. 2 

His presentation, though not developed by him into a system of morals, 
would apparently have afforded more room for the development of the 
social side, in consequence of his use of benevolence, than was the case 
with his continental predecessors; while his distinction between sub- 
jective and objective feeling would give a better working criterion than 
many of the English writers had. These possibilities are, of course, due 
to his breaking away to some extent from the limitations of the conception 
of perfection, and in throwing the emphasis upon feeling instead. How- 
ever, his attempt to derive social pleasures from those of self-love would 
have worked disastrously, as we have observed in the case of British 
writers. 

B. TETENS AND SCHMIDT 

The changed interests of the time are exemplified in such a writer 
as Tetens, whose Philosophische Versuche is mainly occupied with psycho- 
logical topics. Upon the moral side, however, he concludes his work 
with considerations upon the perfectibility of man, and how far this accords 
with his happiness. He concludes that the perfecting of man's nature 
affords larger possibilities of pleasure and happiness, but whether these 
shall become actualities depends largely upon external circumstances. 
Man experiences the most pleasure when enabled to exercise his perfected 
capacities in the degree for which they are best fitted. 3 We cannot always 
be sure that external circumstances will afford this exercise of increased 
perfection and consequent happiness. 4 So it is only in a general way 
that man's increased perfection and happiness run parallel. 5 The initial 
impulse in man is toward the immediately agreeable, and only to a limited 
extent toward happiness, where this is not in accordance with immediate 
pleasure, and still less toward perfection. 6 Thus with Tetens the old 
co-ordination between happiness and perfection has broken down; only 
a general parallel can be shown. The only possibility of reconciling the 
exceptions would be the assumption of a future life. 7 

1 Ibid., I, 216 ff. * Ibid., Ill, 412. 

3 Philosophische Versuche (Leipzig, 1777), II, 809 f., 815. 

4 Ibid., 816 ff. <> Ibid., 8238. s Ibid., 820. I Ibid., 818, S33 f. 



56 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

The entire subordination of perfection to pleasure and happiness in 
the case of a writer who still has a firm belief in their immediate coin- 
cidence is apparently furnished by the Geschichte des Selbstgejuhls of 
Michael Ignaz Schmidt. 1 The only good is pleasure; this is conscious- 
ness of one's own perfection, and beauty and goodness are both inferred 
from such feelings. Self-love is the primal impulse to activity, which it 
initiates in the interests of pleasure, and pronounces things to be good, 
perfect, and beautiful if they agree with it. 

1 For an account of this work I have been obliged to depend upon Dr. Max Dessoir, 
Geschichte der Psychologies I, 271-75 (ed. of 1894); I, 437 f. (ed. of 1902.) 



V. KANT 

In Kant 's own intellectual development we witness the same tendencies 
which were going on in the minds of others, and which characterized the 
period just treated. Bred in the Wolffian perfectionism, Kant came to 
see its inadequacies. Its narrow moral ideal lacked a sufficient social 
content and failed to recognize duty as a moral imperative, while it naively 
attempted to identify pleasure, or at least happiness, with perfection. 
On the other hand, Kant's logical rationalistic training and his strong 
sense of duty led him to detect the inevitable instability and irrespon- 
sibility of an ethics grounded wholly upon feeling. He long tried to 
mediate between the two systems, retaining what was good in both; but 
he finally worked out an independent system of his own, quite different 
from either. 1 

A. THE EARLY RATIONALISTIC PERIOD 

In Kant's early treatises, written prior to 1760, his attitude is thor- 
oughly Wolffian. He believes that the moral life must be founded upon 
a rational basis. Man must be raised to domination over the changing 
and varying movements of the sensibility governed by its pleasures and 
pains, by means of the clear insight of the reason. 

Three other influences which tended to reinforce him in his rational- 
istic position may be noticed. (1) The religion of his parents was that 
of the Pietists — a stern sect who believed that sensuous impulses of all 
kinds must be severely held in leash in order to please God. (2) His own 
weak and sickly body had to be kept in the most careful subjection ; and 
thus in his own experience the opposition between sensibility and reason 
was painfully real. (3) The national condition was such that all must 

1 In the discussion of Kant I am mainly indebted to Dr. Paul Menzer, Der Ent- 
wicklung der Kantischen Ethik in den Jahren 1760 bis 1785 (republished in the Kant- 
Studien, II and III) ; Dr. August Messer, Kants Ethik (Leipzig, 1904) ; Dr. A. Heg- 
ler, Die Psychologie in Kants Ethik (Freiburg i. B., 1891); and Dr. Fr. W. Foerster, 
Der Entwicklunsgang der Kantischen Ethik bis zur Kritik der return Vcrnunft (Berlin, 
(1894). The comprehensive treatment of Dr. Axel Hagerstrom, Kants Ethik (Upsala u. 
Leipzig, 1902), did not attract my attention until too late to be greatly available. 

Abbreviations are: H. =Hartenstein's edition of Kant's Werke; G. S. = the now 
Gesammte Schriften (Berlin, 1902 — ); M. =Max Miiller's translation of the Critique 
0} Pure Reason, the one-volume edition; A. =the translations in Abbott's Kant's 
Theory of Ethics. Quotations are usually made from the translations of Kant's 
works, where such exist. 

57 



58 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

be prepared to sacrifice personal convenience and wealth to the good of 
the state; and Frederick the Great, the " philosopher of Sans Souci," 
himself the advocate of a duty philsosphy, set the example, and was not 
slow to require others to follow it. 1 

Thus a stern religious training, a narrow regimen demanded by his 
personal state of health, and a rigorous government, all reinforced 
the opposition set up by the Wolffian philosophy between the reason 
and the sensibility, and the necessity of governing fife by the former. 

B. THE PERIOD OF ENGLISH INFLUENCE 

During the second decade of his literary activity — led, no doubt, 
by the inadequacies of Wolffian perfectionism — Kant sought to utilize 
the feelings in working out a satisfactory moral statement. He accord- 
ingly made a study of at least three of the British writers who grounded 
morality upon feeling — viz., Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume — as 
well as of Rousseau. 

In the prize essay on Natural Theology and Morals, written in 1762 or 
1763, we find the new ideas of a feeling morality struggling with the old 
perfectionist conceptions for the mastery. He believes that the whole 
content of morality is due to feelings of pleasure and pain. These feelings 
may be analyzed into several principal " sensations of good," from which 
arise higher, but not further reducible, judgments which declare this or 
that to be good. Thus, "Love him who loves you," is an indemonstrable 
material principle of obligation. 

However, the feelings furnish no central principle of morality, and 
leave it in too indeterminate a character. Consequently, the material 
principles of morality, derived from the feelings, must be subordinated 
to the formal principle of perfection furnished by the understanding. 
This formal principle is Wolff's maxim: "Thue das Vollkommendste 
was durch dich moglich ist. " 2 Just how the affective, material principles 
are to be brought into working relationship with this formal principle, 
Kant is unable to state very clearly; and he concludes the essay in doubt 
whether the intellectual faculty or feeling is properly the first ground of 
morality. 

This essay reveals Kant desirous of recognizing a larger social content 
of morality than can be gotten under the old conception of perfection. 
Consequently, he looks to the feelings to supplement this conception, 

1 The nature of the Prussian government seems to have developed in many minds a 
strong, martial sense of duty. Cf. J. R. Seeley, Life and Times of Stein. I, 44 f. 

2 Cf. p. 27, above. 



KANT 59 

and hits upon the device of "formal" and "material" principles of action 
adapted from Crusius, 1 to effect the co-ordination. That he was not 
satisfied with the device is evident from the halting tone with which he 
concludes the essay. 

The prize essay made the perception of the good consist in an "unan- 
alyzable feeling of pleasure." In the Observations on the Feeling oj the 
Beautiful and Sublime (about 1764) he makes a further discrimination 
of this feeling. Even thus early he has too strong an idea of the universal 
and unconditioned character of moral obligation to find in the feelings 
of sympathy and benevolence of the English writers a sufficient basis of 
morality, although he is willing to concede their value in reinforcing moral 
motivation. Instead, he finds the foundation of morality in another 
feeling — that of the beauty and dignity of human nature. The idea of 
the dignity and worth of humanity — a conception which he owes to Rous- 
seau — furnishes at once the universality and the obligatory character 
desired, for "if this feeling had the greatest perfection in any human 
heart, this person would love and cherish himself only so far as he is one 
of all, to whom his widened noble feeling extends itself." 2 However, 
that he is not fully satisfied with this attempt to ground morality in feeling 
may be inferred from his complaints of its indefinite character, when he 
laments, "das Gefuhl ist nicht einstimmig ! " 3 

Kant's ethical position at this time is succinctly stated in the program 
of his lecture course for 1 765-66,4 where he says that moral judgments 
can "immediately, and without the circumlocution of proofs, be recog- 
nized by the human heart through what one calls sentiment;" that the 
investigations of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume have proceeded 
farthest in the search for the first grounds of all morality, but are incom- 
plete and lack precision; and that this completeness and precision are 
to be afforded them by reference to the great significance of the reason 
for moral principles. It seems clear, both from this lecture program and 
from the essays just mentioned, that Kant was disposed at this time to 
take the greater part of his moral system from the British writers, simply 
using rationalistic conceptions to supplement the account, and give it 
greater definiteness and precision. 

While too much stress ought not to be laid upon a treatise written 

in a semi-playful manner, yet it seems quite evident that the Dreams oj 

a Spirit-Seer (1766) represents a considerably altered attitude toward 

the British writers, and that their influence over him was waning. The 

* H., II, 301-4; G. S., II, 293-96. 3 H., II, 248; (7. 5., II, 226. 

a H., II, 239; G. S. y II, 217. 4 H., II, 311 ff.; G. S., II. 303 ff. 



60 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS llj? 'J 

primacy of the will over the feelings is indicated more emphatically, and 
the stronger moral impulse furnished by the law of duty, and the weaker 
one of benevolence, "bear us away to the discomfiture of our selfishness." 1 
The moral impulses here described do not seem to be feelings of pleasure 
and pain, but rather to be attributed wholly to the volitional side of our 
nature. If Kant had had his doctrine of freedom worked out at this 
time, feeling would have ceased to serve either as motive or as criterion 
of morality henceforth, and he would have here enunciated that "there 
is nothing good except a good will;" but as such was not the case, he 
continued to seek a universal standard of morality in feeling. 

C. FROM THE INAUGURAL DISSERTATION TO THE CRITIQUE OF PURE 

REASON 

That a considerable shift took place in Kant's thought at this time is 
indicated by a short but pointed passage in the Inaugural Dissertation 
(1770), in which moral perfection is the ideal, and is to be recognized 
only by the pure intellect. Epicurus and "some moderns who follow 
him from afar," like Shaftesbury, are to be rightly reprehended for at- 
tempting to reduce moral criteria to deductions from the sense of pleasure 
and pain. 2 Perfection is still the highest conception of morality, but its 
content is to be recognized by the pure intellect, apparently, and not by 
an "unanalyzable feeling. " Shaftesbury, who had been highly commended 
in the prize essay and the lecture program, is here emphatically repu- 
diated. From reading this passage one could easily infer that feeling 
is to play no part in morality whatever; but inasmuch as we still find him 
endeavoring to utilize pleasure and happiness in formulating moral prin- 
ciples later in this decade, one hesitates to make a conclusion that would 
necessitate the assumption of another large shift in the other direction, 
upon the strength of so brief a passage. However, it is clear that this 
attitude has greatly changed at this time from what it had been in 1765; 
and it is probable that henceforth he never was a conscious follower of 
the English school. 

Sometime during the decade that intervened between the appearance 
of the Inaugural Dissertation and the Critique of Pure Reason Kant must 
have penned the celebrated "Fragment 6" in Reicke's Lose Blatter. 3 The 

1 H., II, 342 f.; G. S., II, 335; Eng. trans, by Goerwitz, 63 f. 

* H., II, 403; G. S., 395 f.; Eng. trans, by W. J. Eckoff, 55. 

3 It is difficult to fix a more precise date. The subject is fully discussed by Menzer 
in the Kant-Studien, III, 71-90; Thon, Die Grundprinzipien der Kantischen Moral- 
philosophie, etc. (Diss., Berlin, 1895); Foerster, loc. cit. 



KANT 6l 

distinction between the sensible and intellectual faculties is still drawn 
upon the lines of the Dissertation, while the attempt at a transcendental 
deduction of happiness reveals the methodology of the Critique. 

In happiness two things are distinguishable— its matter and its form. 
The first consists in the gratification of sensuous desires; the second, of 
confused intellectual pleasures due to an inner agreement among the 
desires, constitutes virtue, and is the formal condition which makes happi- 
ness possible. "A man by such moral dispositions is worthy to be happy, 
i. e., is in possession of all the means whereby he can effect his own happi- 
ness and that of others." However, he still lacks the empirical elements 
of happiness, since virtue furnishes no motives. These have to be supplied 
by the sensibility. 

This position reminds us very much of Wolff and Mendelssohn in 
many respects; for instance, in the derivation of morality from the intel- 
lect, while motivation must come from the sensibility. It is more like 
the latter in recognizing intellectual pleasures. The treatment is different 
from any rationalistic account in regarding intellectual pleasure as at the 
same time confused, and yet not as a motive to action. 

The fragment is extremely noteworthy in that it shows that Kant 
was endeavoring to find an a priori element in happiness, while he was 
working out his critical philosophy. Had he been satisfied with the result 
of this fragment, he doubtless could have based his critical ethics upon 
happiness. His failure to find a satisfactory a priori element in happiness, 
while he found one in his doctrine of the will, determined the character 
of his ethical system. It is significant, as Foerster remarks, that in this 
fragment Kant does not once mention the word "duty." Private happi- 
ness is made the motive to morality, and even its a priori element, virtue, 
is a personal affair. To be virtuous is to be " worthy of happiness." 
The fact that he was willing so far to abandon the larger social demands, 
which he had recognized at least as early as the Observations on the Beau- 
tiful and Sublime, provided only that he could find an a priori principle 
in private happiness, indicates how pressing was the demand for such a 
principle before he found one in his doctrine of the will. 

The lectures upon Psychology, reported by Politz, Dr. Max Heinze 
has shown almost beyond a doubt, must have been delivered between 
1775 and 1779. 1 Here Kant distinguishes two kinds of pleasure, belonging 
respectively to the sensibility and to the understanding. Those belonging 
to the former are subdivided into animal and human. The psychological 
definition of pleasure here employed is virtually the same as that used by 

* Kant's Vorlesungcn ilber Metaphysik (Leipzig, 1894), 515 f . 



62 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

him in the critical period, though not so well worked out, and so may be 
passed over here. Morality is concerned only with the intellectual pleas- 
ures, which are due to the understanding. 

Intellectual pleasure is distinguished from other kinds by being uni- 
versal and necessary. What is an object of intellectual pleasure is good; 
and "good" is denned as "what must necessarily please everyone." 1 
The tentativeness of this description of the good as intellectual pleasure 
is indicated by his saying that, strictly speaking, it is not a pleasure, because 
the good cannot affect our senses, but that we call it a pleasure because 
we cannot otherwise express "the subjectively impelling power of objective 
necessitation. " 2 This intellectual pleasure alone does not seem sufficient 
to afford us happiness. But it makes us "worthy of happiness." This 
consciousness of desert furnishes the ground for faith in a future life, and 
becomes the motive to virtue, inducing us to obey moral laws, which 
without it would be only chimeras. 

In these lectures we thus have several of the ideas of the critical philos- 
ophy mixed with others of an earlier period. The division into sensible 
and intellectual pleasure is more in the spirit of the Dissertation. The 
inadequacy of intellectual pleasure to serve as a complete motive by itself, 
and yet the idea that it is a partial one, marks a transitional stage in his 
thought. The search for a universal and necessary element in morality, 
the employment of feeling to indicate the subjective side of moral obli- 
gation, the idea that morality only effects "worthiness to be happy," 
and the postulation on this last ground of a future life, all foreshadow 
the critical period. 

In the Critique oj Pure Reason morality is given a larger social content 
than hitherto, and is grounded a priori in a principle of the pure practical 
reason. This principle is not given an explicit formulation. The old 
perfectionist formula has evidently been discarded, while the new maxim 
of the categorical law probably had not yet been worked out. At any 
rate, his only statement here is: "Do that which will render thee worthy 
of happiness." 3 Happiness would consist in the complete satisfaction 
of all our desires concentrated into one, 4 as regards comprehensiveness, 
intensity, and duration. 5 The direct search for this is prudence, which 
can proceed only upon empirical grounds; since happiness is largely a 

1 P. 172 in Politz' edition. 

2 Ibid, p. 187. 

3 H., Ill, 534; G. S., Ill, 525; M., 649. 
4H., Ill, 529; G. S., Ill, 520; M., 642. 
sH., Ill, 532; G. S., Ill, 523; M., 647. 



KANT 6.3 

matter of the satisfaction of sensuous impulses, and no a priori principle 
can be found determining it. 

The moral law is not at all to be derived from the conception of happi- 
ness, nor does the desire for happiness serve as the proper motive for 
moral action. 1 Morality, however, is being " worthy of happiness," 
and involves the idea that ultimately everyone must actually obtain as 
much happiness as he deserves. 2 In this life, to be sure, the individual 
does not realize happiness, since this would necessitate that everyone else 
perfectly complies with it also. But we must believe that this must ulti- 
mately be the case in a future life, and the moral law forces us to postulate 
such a life, and also a Divine Being. Without such belief the "glorious 
ideals of morality are indeed objects of applause and admiration, but are 
not springs of purpose and action. "3 

Though the statement in this Critique is somewhat ambiguous — in 
fact, in places seems almost paradoxical — and is not wholly free from a 
theological setting,* we really have an argument involved similar to that 
of the Critique of Practical Reason. The argument is wholly a logical 
one. It is not a hedonistic desire for happiness that prompts to the obedi- 
ence to the moral law; the latter carries with it its own command, and 
is an expression of our own free will. But the idea of desert of happiness 
is involved in the conception of this moral law. If this desert were not 
thought of as realizable, the moral law would be self -contradictory; it 
would be a chimera, and the belief in its a priori character could not be 
maintained. 

In the statement referred to above — that, if the moral law were univer- 
sally followed, happiness would immediately ensue — we can perceive an 
advance upon " Fragment 6." There individual morality could afford 
individual happiness; here individual happiness is obtainable only through 
universal obedience to the law and universal happiness. The social 
character of both moral obligation and happiness has become recognized. 
It would probably be going too far to say that in the Critique oj Pure 
Reason Kant thinks that the main purpose of the moral law is to effect 
universal happiness; but this is certainly involved in it. The fact that 
he defines moral action as action done in order to deserve happiness indi- 
cates that the connection between the two was certainly prominent in his 
mind. 

x H., Ill, 537; G. S., Ill, 528; M., 652 f. 

'H., Ill, 534; G. S., Ill, 525; M., 640. 

sH, III, 537; G. S., Ill, 528; M., 652. 

4H., Ill, 536; G. S., Ill, 527; M., 651. 



64 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

D. THE ETHICAL SYSTEM IN ITS FINAL FORM 

Between the appearance of the Critique of Pure Reason and the Grund- 
legung, Kant worked out the doctrine of freedom and its identification 
with the moral law. In these he found the a priori principle which he 
had at one time sought in happiness. These become the central point 
in his moral system, and other considerations, such as happiness and pleas- 
ure, are subordinated to it. As the later works all contain essentially 
the same point of view, it will no longer be necessary to discuss them in 
chronological order. 

The psychology of pleasure is stated most fully in the Menschen- 
kunde, edited by Starke, which, Menzer has shown, must have been written 
between the years 1779 and 1788, and so properly belongs to the critical 
period, 1 and in the Anthropologic (1788). In both documents pleasure 
is defined as the feeling of the furtherance, and pain as that of the hin- 
drance, of life. The vital force has a degree along with which a state of 
comfort (das Wohlbefinden) exists, which is neither pleasant nor painful. 
When this state is reduced to a lower pitch by any hindrance, pain is felt. 
The relief of this is pleasure. Pleasure is thus always preceded by pain, 
and is nothing positive. The passage in the Menschenkunde goes on to 
say that corresponding to sensuous pleasure and pain there is intellectual 
pleasure and pain; as in thought we are always dissatisfied with the 
present, and looking forward to the future. Pleasure cannot endure in 
an unbroken continuity, like pain. It is only the sudden, instantaneous 
removal of pain that affords pleasure. Thus in slow diseases there is 
conscious constant pain, and no pleasure. In persons of melancholic 
temperament the pain is constant, the sudden relief is not felt, and there- 
fore many of these are led to suicide as the only possible relief from pain. 
However, Kant regards pain as a wise design of providence in order to 
make us dissatisfied with our condition, and to impel us to progress. 

Kant's psychology of pleasure must appear defective, even to a hedon- 
ist. If pleasure is only negative, while pain is positive, the function of 
the two could only be to conserve the present well-being of the subject; 
for, as soon as the subject were restored to the state of well-being from 
which pain announced a lapse, and the pain were w r holly removed, then 
pleasure, if pleasure is due only to the sudden removal of pain, must cease 
also. There could be no progress. Moreover, as in many cases pleasure 
is not experienced at all in consciousness, while pain is very prominent, 
pessimism seems inevitable. Certainly a state of happiness consisting 
of permanent pleasure would be a contradiction in itself, and could not 

1 Kant-Studien, III, 60. 



KANT 65 

be morally postulated. It is clear that Kant does not always employ 
pleasure in this negative manner in which he here defines it, and that 
his treatment in his ethical works involves a recognition of positive pleas- 
ures, as well as pleasures of activity. Like Leibniz, he employs a defi- 
nition of pleasure which is inadequate to perform what he really intends 
it to do. 

With reference to desire and volition there are two kinds of pleasure: 
(1) contemplative, which is not connected with desire for the object, as in 
judgments of taste; and (2) practical, which is necessarily connected with 
desire for the object. It is with this latter type that ethics is concerned. 
It may be of two different varieties: (a) it may precede desire and be the 
cause of desire and volition, in which case the pleasure is " pathological, " 
since it determines action for its own sake, regardless of the moral law; 
(b) it may follow desire, and attend the feeling of reverence, which is due 
to the action of the reason and its moral law. 1 

Reverence is the feeling present in moral action. Like all other 
feelings, this is subjective. It is due to the consciousness upon the part 
of the sensibility, of its own repression by the reason. This feeling is 
of intellectual origin, and is the only one that can be known a priori. 2 
This feeling is often painful. The moral law checks our self-conceit, 
humbles our self-consciousness, thwarts our inclinations, and produces 
an impression of displeasure which can be known a priori. 3 This, how- 
ever, is only the negative, pathological side of reverence. As the moral 
law comes to be known in its purity and sublimity as the activity of the 
pure practical reason, it awakens positive respect. Then one feels an 
interest in the law, and this conscious recognition of the law affords a feel- 
ing of self-approbation. 4 In the Critiques Kant nowhere explicitly calls 
this positive feeling of reverence pleasurable, 5 though he describes the 
negative aspect as painful; but in the Tugendlehre moral feeling is quite 
frankly spoken of as "susceptibility for pleasure or pain," according as 
one is conscious of the agreement or disagreement of action with the law 
of duty. 6 That pleasure arises from doing one's duty, Kant says very 
explicitly in the latter work; but, of course, it is a subjective feeling that 
is dependent upon the action of the reason, and not at all the cause of it. 

1 Introduction to the Metaphysics 0} Morals. 3 H., V, 83; A. 171. 

*H., V, 178; A., 166. 4H, V, 84; A., 172 

s He almost does so in the Critique 0} Judgment, where he speaks of the moral 
law affording positive intellectual satisfaction in the feeling of the sublime (J 89), 
and of a certain analogy between pleasure in the beautiful forms of nature and interest 
in the moral law (§42). 

6 H., VII, 202-6; A., 309-11. 



66 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

This description evidently is a re-echo of the Wolffian definition of pleasure 
as due to the agreement and co-operation of one's powers. 

The explicit recognition of the presence of pleasure in the feeling of 
reverence in the Tugendlehre does not really represent a change in thought 
from the Critique of Practical Reason. The same idea is implied in the 
earlier work, but is not explicitly stated, perhaps for this reason. He 
was afraid at that time that any recognition of pleasure in moral action 
would be overrated, and he might be interpreted as holding a position 
similar to that of such writers as Mendelssohn and Schiller: whereas, 
at the time of writing the later work, he felt that his position had become 
sufficiently understood to enable him to designate the recognition which 
he was willing to give to pleasure in moral action without being misin- 
terpreted. 

The next topic which we shall have to consider is: Just what place 
does the feeling of reverence, with its attendant pleasure or pain, play in 
the moral act? The feeling clearly appears subsequent to the work of 
the reason, but prior to overt action. Two interpretations as to its func- 
tional significance are open to us. 

First, we may suppose that the practical reason is able to initiate action 
on its own account, without the instrumentality of the sensibility. The 
feeling of reverence is merely an accompanying circumstance, a sort of 
" epi-phenomenon " in moral action, and not at all fundamental. Many 
passages, mostly in the Critique of Practical Reason, seem to confirm 
this view. 1 The feeling is merely the consciousness on the part on the 
sensibility of its own repression, and it has no part whatever to play in the 
moral act. There is no organic relationship between the sensibility and 
the reason. They are irreconcilable factors, and when action is moral the 
sensibility must be forced to the wall and suppressed in the interests of 
morality and freedom. Its only conceivable use is in determining action 
in non-moral situations, where reason need not be brought into exercise. 
At other times, the sensibility, with its feelings of pleasure and pain, is 
a nuisance, an incumbrance that must be pushed aside. In the extreme 
woodenness of the account, and the lack of any functional relationship 
between the sensibility and the reason, this interpretation does not credit 
Kant with any advance upon Wolff. 

Our other alternative is to say that Kant thought that the practical 
reason initiates moral action through the instrumentality of the sensibility. 
Desire may, indeed, be effected by the moral law, but it must evoke pleas- 
ure or pain before it can pass into action. In the mechanism of the moral 

*E. g., H., V, 24, 25 f., 66 f., 76 f.; A., no, 112, 153 f., 164 f. 



KANT 67 

act the feeling of reverence is an essential part of the process: it is at the 
same time the effect upon the sensibility of the action of the reason, and 
the efficient cause of moral action. Action is always the consequence 
of pleasure and pain; but the pleasures and pains of reverence exceed 
all others, and so entirely transform the character of feeling when it is 
subjected to the reason and the moral law. It is scarcely possible to 
interpret the Grundlegung and the Tugendlehre in places, except in some 
such way as this. 1 The passages in the Critique of Practical Reason can, 
we believe, be reconciled with this view. The thesis which Kant is defend- 
ing in each of them is simply that feeling must not be considered as in any 
way prior to the action of the reason, and so determining the morality of 
the act. 2 It is also to be remembered that the Critique of Practical Reason 
proposes to dispense with psychological considerations, and so psycho- 
logical accuracy is not to be expected in it. 3 

If we are justified in adopting this latter interpretation, it is not difficult 
to explain Kant's doctrine of moral interest. Interest in the moral law 
seems to be the same feeling as reverence viewed in its positive aspect, 
and become a motive to action. Through interest reason becomes prac- 
tical, and the moral law is realized in action. 4 Such interest is a rational 
motive independent of the sensibility, in the sense that its origin is not 
due to the sensibility — else it would be ''pathological." It is repeatedly 
described as a " moral feeling." 5 

In this use of interest, Kant is clearly attempting to secure what modern 
ethical psychologists would call the "mediation of impulse." Professor 
Dewey, for instance, speaks of an impulse as mediated when the conse- 
quences of an act, the ideal considerations by which it is evaluated, are 
referred back to it, and the impulse becomes idealized or rationalized. 6 
Kant's distinction between " practical interest," which is rational and 
free, and "pathological interest," which is empirical and dependent upon 
inclinations, is similar. The practical interest has been mediated; the 
pathological interest is unmediated, and unreflective. 7 

1 Especially H., IV, 308 f., and VII, 203 (A., 80 f. and 310). 

* Cf. A., 169, top; H., V. 81. 

3 A., 95, note; H., IV, 9. 

4H., IV, 261 f., 306 f.; V, 84 (A., 30, footnote; 80, footnote; 172 f.). 

s E. g., H., IV, 261; V, 85 (A., 80, 173); cf. Critique of Judgment, §^42. 

6 J. Dewey, The Study of Ethics: A Syllabus (Ann Arbor, 1897), 17-19, 49-55. 

7 However, there is this difference: For Kant the moral law is transcendental 
in character. The finite intelligence becomes aware of it rationally before it feels the 
impulse to act upon it empirically. Kant's problem is to secure the mediation of 



68 PLEASURE IN N ON -HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

If we are justified in our interpretation of Kant's use of reverence 
and interest, there seems to be a way in which the sensibility can be brought 
into active co-operation with the reason in a scheme of self-realization, 
with only very slight modification of Kant's doctrine as a whole. Pleas- 
ure and pain would become the instruments through which the moral law 
becomes realized in human experience. Viewing pleasure as the con- 
comitant of successful activity, and pain as that of unsuccessful activity, 
but neither as the cause which initiates activity, but as useful in rein- 
forcing it and enabling the intelligible self to carry out its ends in the world 
of experience, we can allot to pleasure a genuine and useful place in moral 
self-realization. From such a point of view Kant could have postulated 
a summum bonum like that of Leibniz, which would ever have been a 
progression in the realization of duty, ever attended by pleasure and 
happiness, because duty was ever being successfully realized. Happiness 
would then have stood in logical relationship with his scheme of moral 
action, instead of being somewhat arbitrarily and externally forced into 
the conception of the complete good. 

Two reasons probably explain why Kant did not work out a more 
satisfactory account of the moral act, and effect a more logical relation 
ship between the reason and the sensibility, duty and happiness, (i) 
His method was mainly metaphysical. He wished to discover the a priori 
elements in moral volition, and did not primarily concern himself with 
the psychology of the moral act. The metaphysical validity, the ultimate 
reality of morality, and not the way in which the volitional processes 
go on, occupied his main attention. (2) The inadequacy of his psycho- 
logical definition of pleasure rendered it impossible for him to give it a 
satisfactory place in moral action. He assumed that action upon the 
part of the sensibility is always governed by the direct desire for pleasure 
and happiness. 1 Further, as we have seen, his psychological definition 
of pleasure involves pessimism, if taken literally; because he failed to 
take account of the pleasure of activity for its own sake. 

Having concluded our discussion of Kant's doctrine of pleasure, 
let us now consider his treatment of happiness. On account of the reasons 

duty already recognized by the reason, so that it will pass over into volition, and be 
acted upon. Dewey's problem is to rationalize impulses already present in conscious- 
ness. Doubtless in actual experience we have moral conflicts of both types. 

1 He simply took psychological hedonism for granted, so far as the sensibility 
is concerned. Cf. H., IV, 278; V, 39; VII, 189; G. S., IV, 430; A., 46, 126, 296. 
I have not enlarged upon the hedonistic fallacy in Kant. Perhaps the best discussion 
of the fallacy is that by Woodbridge, International Journal of Ethics, VII, 475 ff. 
Messer fully explains the extent to which Kant is guilty of it (op. cit., chap. x). 



KANT 69 

mentioned in the description of his doctrine of pleasure, Kant failed to 
give happiness a logical relationship to the rest of his moral system, though, 
as we shall see, he gave it considerable recognition — more, perhaps, than 
*s generally understood. 

In the works of the critical period, happiness consists of the complete 
satisfaction of all empirical wants and inclinations; 1 it is a state of unin- 
terrupted pleasure; 2 and it seems to comprehend the conservation and 
welfare of the being that enjoys it. 3 It is not an ideal of the reason 
but of the empirical faculty of the imagination, and rests solely upon 
empirical grounds. 4 It consists wholly in a pleasurable state due to 
the satisfaction of desires arising from the sensibility. In this view of 
happiness we are reminded of Wolff. 5 

The history of Kant's treatment of happiness shows a gradual dis- 
placement of it from its originally prominent position during the sixties. 
It is gradually forced to surrender one function after another to the moral 
law. In the critical period what it still retains are the somewhat tattered, 
but by no means inconsiderable, remnants of its former authority. Three 
of these are especially prominent. 

1. It is a duty to seek the happiness of others. In the precritical 
period, as we have seen, one of the main difficulties, in Kant's mind, 
in the way of making one's happiness the basis of moral obligation, was 
that it failed to give a sufficiently social content to moral action. The 
pleasures of benevolence and sympathy were altogether inadequate for 
the purpose. The happiness of others remained an important part 
of moral obligation; and in the Tugendlehre it makes up the main content 
of our duty to them, their moral well-being involving only indeter- 
minate obligation. 6 

2. Kant also continued to recognize it as a duty to seek one's own 
happiness, under important limitations. The distinction between happi- 
ness and morality is not an inevitable opposition ; we are simply required 
to "take no account" of happiness when duty intervenes. Kant undoubt- 
edly recognized that a great deal of the ordinary conduct of life is non- 
moral, and in such cases, where no moral issue is involved, one is justified 
in following what Kant believed to be one's invariable natural impulse 
to happiness. Kant goes even farther than this. It actually becomes a 
dttty to seek one's own happiness when this affords the means of fulfilling 

« H., IV, 253; G. S., IV, 405; A, 2i. 3 H., IV, 243; G. S. t III, 395; A, II. 

* H., V, 22; A, 108. 4 H., IV, 267; G. S., IV, 267; A., 36. 

S Though Wolff docs not hold consistently to this view. Cf. pp. 27 ff. above. 
6 H., VII, 189-92; A., 296-99. 



70 PLEASURE IN N ON -HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

our duty (e. g., acquirements of skill, riches, etc.), and when the absence 
of happiness (e. g., in poverty) would furnish temptation to transgress 
the law of duty. 1 The reason why Kant did not make this recognition of 
happiness more prominent in his exposition is partly because his 
hedonistic psychology seemed to render it unnecessary, and partly be- 
cause the strongly hedonistic tendencies of the age caused Kant to feel 
it necessary to throw all the emphasis the other way. The subsequent 
lapse into which Romanticism fell shows that Kant was justified in 
affirming with all his might the unqualified force of the categorical 
imperative. 

3. Another notable recognition of happiness is its retention in the com- 
plete good. 2 It is not, of course, the main element in the highest good, 
nor is it an element that seems to follow logically from it. The highest 
good is simply arbitrarily widened to include happiness in the complete 
good. Without going into the merits of the discussion between Hager- 
strom and Messer 3 as to whether and how far Kant is inconsistent with 
himself in including happiness in the complete good, it is unquestionably 
true that to the minds of many people the argument for God, freedom, 
and immortality would have been much stronger if he had presented 
them simply as postulates necessary to insure the completion of purposes 
that are morally enjoined upon us, but cannot be carried out in this life. 
It seems tolerably evident, as Messer indicates, that Kant always felt 
that there must be some kind of inner connection between virtue and 
happiness. Such reiterated expressions as "worthy to be happy" point 
in this direction, and his belief that punishment in the next world is morally 
ordered, confirms it. 4 At any rate, Kant's use of happiness here in a way 
that certainly is not required by his argument, and to many minds actually 
weakens it, shows how far Kant actually was from being a rigorist. He 
really favored hedonism more than his system warranted. 

The conspicuous failure in Kant's ethical treatment of pleasure and 
happiness, as has been said, is his failure to reorganize them, and bring 
them into logical relationship with duty in the moral act. He had begun 
to do this in his treatment of reverence and interest, but he never worked 

1 H., V, 97 f. ; A., 187. The doctrine of radical evil affords no contradiction 
to this interpretation. That is not inherent in the sensibility as such, but only in the 
tendency to subordinate the moral law to self-love. Cf. Messer, op. cit., 237. 

2 An interesting development of this idea of the "complete good" has been re- 
cently made by Professor E. B. McGilvary, "The Summum Bonum," in Vol. I of the 
University of California Contributions to Philosophy. 

3 Hagerstrom, op. cit., 499 f.; Messer, op. cit., 249 ff. 

4 H., VII, 149 f. 



KANT 71 

the idea out and interpreted happiness in the light of it, as it would have 
been possible for him to have done except for the inadequacy of his defi- 
nition of pleasure. He inherited from Wolff a hedonistic psychology, 
so far as the sensibility was concerned, and a hopeless opposition between 
it and the reason; and he never outgrew this inherited limitation. Unable 
to overcome this opposition between duty and happiness, the greatness 
of his work rather lies in his full recognition and development of it. 

As has been pointed out, this opposition was not appreciated by the 
perfectionist school. Kant's development was prompted by his percep- 
tion that morality includes more than individual well being, however 
we may refine the conception. The unconditional character of moral 
obligation, and its entire independence of feeling and inclination, were 
perceived by him, and enunciated with directness and eloquence that is 
sublime. 



VI. SEVERAL NINETEENTH-CENTURY NON-HEDONISTS 

It is of course impossible, except in a very general way, to characterize 
as a whole the non-hedonistic writers since Kant, which are here to be 
noticed. With the rebirth of national self-consciousness at the beginning 
of the nineteenth century, and the enthusiastic efforts and sacrifices made 
by patriots in consequence, with the great industrial development that 
has made men and nations more economically interdependent, and with 
the increased human sympathy revealed in a thousand ways that imply 
a recognition of common brotherhood, the social nature of morality and 
duty could not fail to be recognized. This closer sense of mutual interests 
and sympathies has led Utilitarians to believe that a man's personal hap- 
piness is necessarily dependent upon universal happiness. To non- 
hedonistic writers who are not satisfied with the arguments for this kind 
of a reconciliation, the essentially social character of morality, and its 
superiority and fundamental opposition to the solicitations of personal 
pleasure, have been unquestioned. 

With a clearer sense of the unity of the conscious life, and a better 
feeling for historical development — results due in a considerable measure 
to the work of Kant — there is no longer to be observed so sharp a dualism 
between happiness and moral action, nor such arbitrary, external methods 
employed at overcoming it, as we have seen in the ethical postulates of 
Kant. 

Speaking generally, two attitudes toward happiness may be distin- 
guished. Some have extruded what have seemed the selfish, anti-social, 
and unaesthetic elements from a happiness composed simply of pleasure, 
and have associated this refined happiness, often distinguished as blessed- 
ness, with the realization of the moral ideal. Such is the attitude of Fichte, 
Herbart, and Lotze. Schopenhauer, who despaired of the realization 
of any positive moral ideal, also employs a quasi-happiness of aesthetic 
contemplation as a mitigation of more intense suffering and defeat. 
Another attitude is represented by those who refuse to see any connec- 
tion between happiness, however refined, and ultimate moral attainment; 
and, while recognizing a limited functional utility to pleasure and feeling 
in the psychology of the moral act, refuse to recognize happiness as any- 
thing more than a stepping-stone to a higher ethical plane. Hegel, T. 
H. Green, and Nietschze may thus be classified. The diversity of philo- 

72 



SEVERAL NINETEENTH-CENTURY NON-HEDONISTS 73 

sophical beliefs represented in each of these groups reveals how very 
general has been the basis of classification. 1 

A. FICHTE AND HEGEL 

The opposing attitudes of Fichte and Hegel arose from the difficulties 
involved in the somewhat paradoxical position of Kant, which at the same 
time maintained that pleasure is empirical and subjective, and yet affirmed 
that a happiness composed of such empirical and subjective feelings is 
a necessary ethical postulate. Both Fichte and Hegel are agreed that 
such a happiness (GluckseligkeU) cannot be regarded as the reward of 
virtue; but while Fichte substituted for this a refined form of happiness 
which he called blessedness (Seligkeit), Hegel could not concede to happi- 
ness anything more than a transitional stage in moral development, and 
thought that the satisfaction which comes from truly ethical action must 
be of a wholly different character. 

Neither Fichte nor Hegel corrected Kant in his supposition that all 
empirical desires are hedonistic; but while the opposition between empirical 
pleasure and moral action is no less genuine, it seems less arbitrary, as 
we find in each suggestions that the latter develops out of the former. In 
this respect they seem to have more of a sense of moral development, 
and come more closely to our modern evolutionary point of view. 

Kant was a pre-revolutionary writer, and his ethics embodies much 
of the individualism of Rousseau. Fichte represents the best elements in 
the Revolution, and sought to give it a lofty ethical character. He gives 
a larger recognition to feeling in his use of conscience and blessedness 
in moral action than Kant had done ; this is natural in the case of a writer 
living in a period when the Revolution, in making men conscious of their 
own personalities, had inevitably emphasized the place of feeling. More- 
over, the national self-consciousness, which he had done so much to awaken, 
gave expression to patriotism, which is as much a matter of sentiment 
as of duty. Such a philosopher must inevitably make the function of 
feeling in carrying out the command of duty more prominent than Kant 
had done. Hegel, on the other hand, represents the reaction which set 
in against the Revolution, and is the champion of absolutism and bureau- 
cracy. Consequently, he stood for the entire repression of feeling and 
individuality in the interests of the state and church, in which alone true 
objectivity is to be found. 

1 The classification does not seem important enough to justify treating Hegel 
out of chronological order; especially as the difference between the two attitudes 
can best be shown by treating his view in connection with that of Fichte. 



74 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

Besides the general tendency of the times, much of this difference 
may be attributed to the characters of the men themselves. Fichte was 
a man of strong emotional temperament, who acted more quickly than 
he thought, and at the same time was a man of high moral integrity and 
conscientiousness. Such a man, while painfully appreciating the necessity 
of subordinating the feelings to the intellect, could not fail to recognize 
the genuine worth of feeling, if it could only be kept in its proper sub- 
ordinate place. Hegel, on the other hand, is described as a bloodless sort 
of man, coldly intellectual. Himself without emotions he could not fail to 
exalt the rational sphere in which his intellect achieved magnificent results, 
while he despised emotions and feelings, which he could not understand, 
but which he clearly saw made men act and think less rationally and con- 
sistently than he. 

Fichte, even more consistently than Kant, made the central point in 
his system the fulfilment of duty. It is in this that freedom consists; 
and the whole of life and experience has its raison d'etre in furnishing 
opportunity for the exercise of duty. Pleasure, happiness, and impulse 
are evaluated with reference to the carrying-out of duty. So far as they 
are conducive to this, or play a functional part therein, they are good and 
moral; so far as they impede the realization of duty, they are bad and 
immoral. Consequently, we have two kinds of feeling, happiness and 
impulse: the moral kinds, which are good, and the immoral kinds which 
are evil. 

Logically prior to all experience exists the primal impulse to activity, 
which is an important feature of the Fichtean system. The idea, of course, 
came to him from Spinoza. Activity, however, was a much more positive 
category in his mind than was the conatus in the mind of Spinoza. This 
primal, impulsive ego, in order to realize the moral law and exercise its 
freedom, posits a world of nature, or non-ego, in which the material of 
duty is presented objectively. But the pure ego, being intellectual and 
transcendental in character, cannot directly act upon this finite matter. 
It therefore posits in opposition to this material of nature a finite ego, in 
which the primal impulse to duty is present. The vocation of the finite 
ego is to exercise its freedom in the use of the material of duty presented 
to it in sensuous form by nature, and realize the lofty aims of the moral 
law through it. 

The non-ego, or nature, also has an impulse, and its action upon the 
finite ego (which, as an object in the world of objects, can be affected 
mechanically) awakens feelings of pleasure and pain, and desires. It 
is necessary that this should occur in order that the finite ego may employ 
these impulses, desires, and feelings for the carrying-out of the moral 



SEVERAL NINETEENTH-CENTURY NON-HEDONISTS 75 

law. These are neither good nor bad in themselves, and become good 
or bad only as the finite ego is affected by them. If the finite ego exercises 
its own freedom and employs them as means for the performance of duty, 
they are good and fulfil their proper function. If, however, the finite 
ego treats them as furnishing ends in themselves, the finite ego fails to 
exercise its freedom, and so far becomes a merely mechanical object in 
the world of objects. In experiencing feeling and natural impulse, the 
finite ego is passive; and what should properly be the means of action 
becomes perverted into the ends of action. The finite ego thus becomes 
entangled in a mesh of sensuous pleasures and inclinations, and, no longer 
standing under its own dominion, or that of the transcendental ego, it 
becomes the slave of nature. 1 The possibility of this constitutes the 
radical evil in man. The failure of the finite ego to exercise its freedom 
is due to slothjulness — disinclination to reflect, so as to discern its duty, 
and employ it in the interests of its own freedom. 2 

Pleasures have no unitary principle in themselves, and can properly 
serve only as instruments for the ego to use in working out its duty. Happi- 
ness thought of as a harmonious totality of pleasures (Gliickseligkeit) 
is thus a contradiction in terms. It could not exist; and if it did, to 
seek it would be directly opposed to the higher development of the ego, 
and would be morally bad. To affirm that God guarantees to men such 
happiness is the height of impiety. Thus Fichte sharply disagrees with 
Kant in regard to happiness as a moral postulate. 3 

Though Fichte thus emphatically repudiates pleasure as furnishing 
the end of action, he recognizes even more fully than Kant that the exer- 
cise of freedom and performance of duty is attended by a certain feeling 
of pleasure. When the finite ego acts in accordance with freedom and 
the primal impulse, a feeling of enjoyment arises; and whenever this is 
not the case, sorrow and dissatisfaction are felt. 4 This kind of feeling 
is unique in that it is innate in the experience of the finite ego. This 
feeling is conscience. 5 It is not dependent upon anything external, but 
arises out of the depths of the soul, and has its source in the transcen- 

1 Werke, II, 314; IV, 108 f.; Fichte' s Popular Works (trans, by Wm. Smith, 
LL. D., London, 1889), I, 473. The Science of Ethics as Based on tlie Science of Knowl- 
edge (trans, by A. E. Kroeger, London, 1897), 113 ff. 

2 Werke, IV, 177 fF., 202; Kroeger, op. cit., 188 ff., 212. 

3 The most trenchant statement is in the "Appelation gegen die Anklage des 
Atheismus," Werke, V; cf. esp. p. 219. 

* Werke, IV, 143 f.; Kroeger, op. cit., 151. 

5 Kant's reverence is thus developed by Fichte into conscience. It is clearly a 
feeling, being the felt consciousness of our inner freedom. Cf. A. Dimitrotf, Die 
psychologischen Grundlagen der Ethik J. G. Fichte's (Jena, 1S98), 181. 



76 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

dental ego. Even the feeling of dissatisfaction is not a feeling of unalloyed 
regret. Its presence shows that we are not totally depraved. We are 
glad that we are capable of feeling it, and our self-contempt is lessened 
by being aware that we still have a conscience, and our knowledge that 
this sorrow is a wholesome spur that sooner or later will impel us to better 
action. 1 

Fichte does not go so far as Kant in saying that it is ever a duty to 
seek our own happiness; though he does make it a material duty to keep 
our body and external possessions in such a condition that we may employ 
them in the pursuit of our duty most successfully. Nor could one interpret 
Fichte as regarding any part of action as non-moral. The pursuit of 
sensuous pleasure is not, however, the greatest evil. That is slothfulness. 
Anything is better than that. So action for even sensuous pleasure repre- 
sents the first step upward toward the blessed life. 2 

While Fichte has unmixed contempt for happiness viewed as the 
summation of pleasure, he revives the Spinozistic conception of beatitude 
(Seligkeit, beatitudo), but with a considerably modified significance, remind- 
ing us in some respects more of Leibniz. Beatitude is a state which can 
be reached in this life, by carrying out the moral law in one's conduct as 
perfectly as the limitations of finite individuality will admit. 3 The method 
of reaching this is largely intellectual, but also active. The radical evil 
is due to failure to think out one's duty — a statement which involves the 
idea of active thinking. The blessed life itself differs from that of Spinoza 
in the greater emphasis upon its active side ; it is no state of idle contem- 
plation, but one of unceasing activity. 4 Nor is there any such attempt 
to exclude feeling altogether as Spinoza made. Only the immoral and 
anti-social feelings are excluded. In this blessed life there is "eternal 
possession of the fulness of all that one is capable of enjoying," "admir- 
able serenity and loveliness," "love," "freedom from pain, trouble, sorrow, 
and privation." 5 This blessed life is not a state of absolute perfection. 
Man is finite, and so is infinitely removed from such a state, and can never 
attain it. 

Consequently, as with Leibniz, Fichte 's beatitude is a state of eternal 
progress, constantly rising to new heights of attainment. It is on the 

1 Werke, IV, 146; V,499 f-5 Kroeger, op. cit., 154; Smith, op. cit., II, 416 f. 

2 Werke, V, 499; Smith, op. cit., II, 416 f. 

3 Werke, V, 409; Smith, op. cit., II, 305. 

4 Cf. C. Bos, "La beatitude chez Spinoza et chez Fichte," Archiv. fur Geschichte 
der Philosophie, XVIII. 

s Smith, op. cit., II, 474-77; Werke, V, 548-50. 



SEVERAL NINETEENTH-CENTURY NON-HEDONISTS 77 

ground of the necessity of realizing the law of duty which will take forever, 
that Fichte postulates immortality. Such a view does not seem pessi- 
mistic to a busy, active personality like Fichte. With much the same 
view of pleasure, and with the same view of a primal impulse to activity 
Fichte 's counsel is just the opposite of Schopenhauer's: "Act! Act! 
it is to that end that we are here. . . . Let us rejoice that power is given 
to us, and that our task is infinite." 1 

There is much in Fichte that is quite in the spirit of our present func- 
tional and genetic modes of interpreting life, besides his assertion of the 
primacy of the practical reason; and beneath the heavy verbiage of his 
technical phraseology we can discern one of the noblest and most attrac- 
tive personalities with which we become acquainted in philosophy. 2 

Hegel follows Kant and Fichte in affirming that only in rational 
action is the will free. He has a better sense of historical development, 
however, than either of the other two, and for him the attainment of free- 
dom and rationality is a gradual process. At first superior to the animals 
rather by his possibilities than in actuality, man gradually, through thought 
and reflection, achieves a consciousness of his action, and so comes to be 
a partaker in reason. 

In the first stage of his upward development the will is free only in an 
abstract and formal manner. Man is guided by the "utterly subjective 
and superficial feeling of pleasant and unpleasant." 3 Pleasure is the 
harmony between external conditions and internal impulses, having for 
their purpose the canceling of some defect or want. Pain is felt where 
existing facts do not agree with one's desires. 4 "While pleasure and pain 
thus do furnish a sort of union between subject and object, this syn- 
thesis is only of an abstract and formal character, only taking account of 
this relationship from the individual's own subjective point of view. Con- 
sequently, pleasure attaches itself to all sorts of objects, and there is no 
unitary principle in it as regards the object in its true universality. 5 

A further stage in the transition from the primitive state of the will 
as merely natural impulse, unguided by reflection, and the will as abso- 
lutely free, is represented by passionate action. At first the will was only 
natural impulse or inclination, influenced by pleasure. If, now, the prac- 

1 Closing words of the Vocation of the Scholar, quoted from Smith. 

2 "Er war eine der tiichtigsten Personlichkeiten, die man je gesehen" (Goethe). 

3 Philosophy of Mind (trans, by Wallace), §472; Werke, VII, Part II, 364. 

4 Ibid., 474. 

s "Philosophische Propadeutik, " Werke, XVIII, p. 56; trans, by W. T. Harris, 
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, IV, 174. 



78 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

tical spirit throws itself in its totality into any one particular form of 
impulse, we have passion. Passion, like subjective impulse, is neither 
good nor bad in itself; it is subjective and contingent. Before man has 
become free and rational, the Spirit often directs his activities through 
the instrumentality of passion. Thus the great results of history have 
been accomplished through men who were not at all conscious of lofty 
moral ends, but acted for their own selfish interests and purposes. Thus 
the Spirit craftily employed their impulses and passions for the carrying 
out of ethical purposes, and objectifying them in institutions. 1 

The next stage in the transition is that of happiness. In this particular 
impulses and desires are no longer followed immediately, for the sake of 
the pleasure involved in them. They are instead compared with one 
another, weighed, and calculated. Happiness is represented as a totality 
of enjoyment, and furnishes a standard by which particular impulses are 
limited and co-ordinated, and one does not give way to what will afford 
only momentary enjoyment. In this way the grossness of animal pleasure 
is refined, and man's dispositions and tastes are softened and improved. 
But the universalizing which takes place in happiness is still subjective 
and formal, and does not take account of the object. Thought, however, 
has the upper hand at this stage, and considerable progress over the 
preceding stages has been made. 2 

When one at last enters upon the rational stage, the contrast between 
subjective individuality represented by individual interests, and the rights 
of the world, is recognized, and a sort of working adjustment between the 
two is effected. Here we have the field of morality (Moralitat). In 
the final stage the two elements, subjective and objective, which were 
still opposed in morality, are brought together in a higher synthesis, and 
we have concrete social morality (Sittlichkeif), in which the content of 
morals has become objective and universal, and is revealed in institutions, 
such as the family, state, and church. In this final stage pleasure and 
happiness evidently have no place in determining the ends of action, or 
furnishing a moral ideal. One's whole concern is to realize the object 
itself, and its subjective relation, expressed by pleasure and happiness, 
is utterly lost sight of, and is a matter of indifference. 3 

But before morality, however objectified as social morality, can be 
realized in the action of a finite being, it must find expression in his voli- 

i Werke, IX, p. 41; Philosophy of History (translated by Sibree), 34. 

2 Philosophy of Right (trans, by S. W. Dyde), §20; Werke VIII, §20; cf. Werke, 
XVIII, p. 58; Harris, op. cit., 176. 

3 Werke, VII, ii, §472, addition; XVIII, pp. 56 f; Harris, op. cit., 174. 



SEVERAL NINETEENTH-CENTURY NON-HEDONISTS 79 

tional processes. To initiate action, interest must be aroused and for 
great, energetic action, this interest must take the strongly emotional form 
of passion. 1 Hegel thus agrees with Kant in finding feeling necessary 
in the mechanism of the moral act, although not properly determining 
the grounds for action. Through the instrumentality of thought and 
reflection Hegel believes that the universal element represented by ethics 
and religion will not only be recognized by the mind, but will awaken 
interest and passion, and become expressed in action. 

The difficulty in making a course of action that has been presented 
to the mind get expressed in feeling in this way is apparent. It seems 
to one that Hegel 's ethical account suffers at this point from its complete 
divorce between thought and feeling. If the action of the mind in which 
the higher ethical values are recognized could have been a psychosis in 
which thought and feeling were both present, he would not have had to 
connect the two in what impresses one as really an external and arbitrary 
manner, in order to secure action. It seems as though Hegel's position 
would need but slight modification in order to escape this difficulty. 
Just as pleasure is a harmony between desires and external conditions 
on the subjective side when we act merely upon impulse, so, when our 
vision is widened and we intellectually recognize social morality in its 
objectivity, our feelings are similarly widened in their scope. In the final 
synthesis of subject and object of which he speaks, when the self has 
become identified with the object in thought and action, its feelings have 
become widened at the same time, so that these are vitally dependent 
upon social realization for their character. In this case, happiness, viewed 
in this widened sense and taken in its totality, would be correlative with 
morality, social morality, and religion, taken in their totality. The diffi- 
culty that stood in the way of Hegel's taking such an attitude was the 
same dualism present in Kant and Fichte. All three assume psycho- 
logical hedonism for the empirical self, and have to oppose to this a rational 
self in which pleasure is not the end of action. Had they given more 
attention to psychology, and discovered that neither impulsive nor delib- 
erate action is actuated by an inevitable motivation in the direction of 
pleasure, this dualism in their ethics would have been unnecessary. 

B. SCHOPENHAUER 

Schopenhauer's primal impulse to activity — "the will to live" — is 
much the same idea that we have found in Fichte. The very different 

1 Werke, VII, ii, §§474, 475 and addition; IX, pp. 28, 29; Wallace, op. cit., Sibroe, 
op. cit., 230°. This is an adaptation of the Kantian doctrine of interest; cf. p. 67 
above. 



80 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

significance attached to this impulse by Schopenhauer is largely due to 
temperamental causes. Fichte's was an intensely active personality, 
and to him the notion that the goal to which the primal impulse is directed 
is infinitely removed, is a welcome assurance of immortality, and a blessed 
life consisting in ceaseless struggle and progress. Schopenhauer, on 
the other hand, being of a nature which craves the rewards of success, 
but finds the struggle and effort of attainment unwelcome, recognizing 
nothing good in activity apart from its results, and seeing that these last 
are never fully gained, concludes that the will to live is essentially evil, 
and all human activity is vain and abortive. 1 

The Platonic definition of pleasure and pain, as used by Kant and 
Leibniz, has been shown to be implicitly pessimistic. These writers, 
however, had many other ideas in which they were more interested, and 
did not discover these pessimistic implications ; and if they had, this would 
simply have resulted in their correcting their accounts of pleasure, so as 
to recognize the pleasure of activity for its own sake. Schopenhauer, 
on the other hand, snatched upon this definition of pleasure, worked out 
its latent pessimism to its logical conclusions, and found in it a confirma- 
tion of his doctrine. He reasoned that since pleasure simply consists in 
the consciousness of the removal of a want, and the want itself is the 
occasion of pain, and so pleasure is merely negative and transient, while 
pain is positive and continuous with consciousness itself, the pain in life 
must obviously outweigh the pleasure. Happiness, therefore, thought of 
as a state of continuous and unalloyed pleasure, is a contradiction in 
terms, and an absolute impossibility. 

Two other Kantian ideas of which Schopenhauer makes use in this 
connection are the disinterestedness of moral action, and the disinterest- 
edness of aesthetic pleasure in the beautiful — the latter a conception in 
the Critique of Judgment of which Kant himself did not make any 
ethical application. 2 The only recourse to escape from existence, which is 
inevitably disappointing, is to deny the will to live, to cease to strive, and 
cease to have interests. He recognizes in sympathy, a conception derived 
from British sources, the only positively justifiable interest which one may 

1 The chief sources for Schopenhauer's attitude upon our problem are the "prize 
essay" on the Basis of Morality (trans, by A. B. Bullock); The World as Will and 
Idea, Book IV, esp. § 65, and chap, xlvii; and a short essay "On Ethics" in the Parerga 
und Parilopomena (trans, by E. B. Bax in Schopenhauer's Selected Essays, "Bohn 
Library"). 

2 Though Kant did attach some moral significance to the feeling of the sublime. 
See p. 65 above, footnote 5. 



SEVERAL NINETEENTH-CENTUPY N ON -HEDONISTS 81 

have; and this constitutes the basis of morality for him. Sympathy itself, 
however, involving a denial of personal and selfish desires, is in a sense 
disinterested. The hope of success in moral achievement in thus denying 
the personal will through sympathy is afforded by aesthetic contemplation, 
whose disinterested satisfaction affords temporary relief. 

The answer to Schopenhauer, of course, is to indicate the desirableness 
of activity for its own sake, by pointing out the pleasures of unimpeded 
activity, and the consequent possibility of a happiness consisting in con- 
stant activity. The failure of such writers as Leibniz and Fichte to 
develop this conception of pleasure, using instead the utterly inadequate 
Platonic definition, afforded Schopenhauer the opportunity to use the 
conception to fortify his pessimism. An important service of the latter 
was to call forth this necessary correction in the definition of pleasure 
and happiness. 

C. HERBART 

A more positive ethical use of Kant's aesthetic doctrine had already 
been made by Herbart. Through aesthetic pleasure he thought that the 
narrowness of the Kantian morality, and its abstract, empty character, 
could be overcome. 1 Pleasure, in Herbart 's psychology, is due to the 
harmonious co-operation of the different ideas, and pain to their disa- 
greement. When a presentation, upon its emergence above the threshold 
of consciousness, is in harmony with the presentations already there, a 
pleasant feeling ensues; but when some of the presentations present in 
consciousness strive to thwart and inhibit the new presentation, while 
others aid it, the consequent tension is painful. Such pleasures and pains 
are often empirical, and involve no a priori principles. Consequently, a 
happiness composed of pleasures merely, without further specification, 
would not be a proper end of morality. 2 

However, as Kant had himself recognized in the Critique of Judgment, 
the feeling of the beautiful is not of this empirical and indeterminate 
character. It arouses involuntary and disinterested pleasure, which is 
a priori. Herbart concludes from this, that a morality based upon the 
feeling of the beautiful will have the necessary universality and objec- 
tivity. 3 He distinguishes five different and not further reducible forms 
of moral beauty: inner freedom (agreement of the will with the judgment); 
perfection, due to energy, variety, and co-operation of desires and striv- 

1 M. Mauxion, La metaphysique de Herbart, 317 ff. 

2 Such an interpretation seems justifiable from such passages as Werke, XII, 
126 (Hartenstein's ed.). 

3 Allgetneine fraktische Philosophic, Introduction. 



82 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

ings; benevolence —a social principle due to the agreement of one 's will 
with that of others; right; and equity. The first three of these principles 
please positively; the latter two, negatively— i. e., because their opposites 
displease us. 1 

This Herbartian scheme may be regarded as an advance upon Kant and 
Hegel, in giving a larger content to morality, by introducing the feelings, 
and by the broader significance which the doctrine of interest, now much 
current in educational circles, is able to assume in consequence. It also 
represents an advance in recognizing the value of psychology for ethics. 
Aside from the objections to its mechanical view of consciousness, and 
its failure to provide for a self — difficulties which do not concern us here — 
the great deficiency in the account is its failure to give any adequate grounds 
for the force and authority of duty. Morality certainly seems to ordinary 
consciousness to have greater force and a more categorical nature than 
aesthetic principles can have. Herbart's partial recognition of this in 
asserting that moral beauty is superior to all other kinds, and is unique, 
implicitly confesses that morals really must be something more than even 
the highest branch of aesthetics. 

D. LOTZE 

That a larger significance should be attributed to feeling in ethics 
is not surprising in the case of a writer belonging past the middle of the 
nineteenth century, with its wider interests and sympathies, and its larger 
recognition in its religious, social, political, and literary activities of the 
genuine worth and significance of feeling and sentiment. The character 
of Lotze's problem, and the attitude which he took, may also be supposed 
to have exercised an influence in the same direction. A writer who recog- 
nized the significance and worth of a mechanical interpretation of the 
universe on the one hand, but believed at the same time that such mechan- 
ical laws are subordinate to mental activity, would naturally be led to 
perceive in feeling something that distinguishes man from the mechanism 
of nature, and to ascribe to it an importance as an evaluating and teleo- 
logical factor. Unfortunately, Lotze never worked out his ethical doctrine 
in detail, never writing the portion of the Metaphysics in which this was 
to be presented. We are therefore forced to derive these from a few pas- 
sages in the Microcosmus and the outlines of his lecture courses. This 
is the more disappointing because his presentation of feeling and happi- 

i Op. cit., Book I; Einleitung in die Philosophic §§90 ff. Professor A. W. Small, 
in his General Sociology, chap, xxxii (Chicago, 1905), similarly finds in human con- 
duct six not further reducible interests. 



SEVERAL NINETEENTH-CENTURY N ON -HEDONISTS 83 

ness in their moral significance is unique in several respects, and extremely 
suggestive. 

Psychologically, he thinks the hypothesis probably correct 

tbat feelings are the results and tokens of the agreement or disagreement between 
the excitations produced in us, and the conditions of our permanent well-being. 
Pleasure would therefore depend upon every encitement to the use of our natural 
capacities within the limits of these conditions, and it would rise in degree with 
the intensity of these encitements; on the contrary, pain would depend upon 
the fact that the excitations suffered are at strife with the aforesaid conditions. 1 

This definition clearly recognizes the pleasure in activity. It has another 
consequence of ethical significance for Lotze. Pleasure and pain thus 
defined are simply general designations for a great variety of feelings, 
whose specific content is not taken into account in saying whether they 
are pleasant or painful. 

Consequently, to set up ''pleasure in general," or happiness simply 
composed of pleasure, as a moral criterion would be to set up something 
that is never actually experienced by us in so vague a manner. We never 
experience pleasure in general any more than we do color in general. 
The particular pleasures which we do experience are qualitatively different 
from one another, and each has its own value. Thus egoistic hedonism 
rests upon a logical fallacy. The thought is the same as Hegel's, when 
he said that pleasure is formal and empirical, lacking in any true objec- 
tivity. Lotze has made an advance in stating the principle in psycho- 
logical terms. Usually we do not think of hedonism as open to the charge 
of basing its moral principles upon an empty abstraction. This reproach 
is usually reserved for Kant. However, it is clear that to make pleasure 
or happiness the moral criterion, without further specification, will not 
serve to account for the moral distinctions which we all recognize. 2 

While thus objecting to hedonistic formalism, Lotze still believes 
that moral values are due to feeling. All self-consciousness, in the first 
place, is due to feeling. Without this, to be sure, one could be conscious 
of one's self and others as all beings in a world, as subjects each of which 
is its own object; but the uniqueness of selfhood, the different valuation 
given to one's own affairs, all desire to change any relations in the world, 
are due to feeling. 3 And, in the second place, the distinctions which make 
some acts moral, and others immoral are due to qualitative distinctions 

1 Outlines of Psychology (trans, by Ladd), §48; cf. Metaphysic, translated by 
Bosanquet, II, 225 f. 

2 Outlines of Psychology, § 8. 

3 Ibid., §§52, 53; Bosanquet, op. cit., I, 248-51, 687 if. 



84 PLEASURE IN N ON -HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

in feelings — i. e., because we experience different kinds of pleasure with 
different moral values. Sensuous feelings have regard only to the well- 
being of the individual person experiencing them. Ethical and aesthetic 
feelings, on the other hand, are expressions of the furtherance or disturb- 
ance of the universal spirit in us. 1 

All moral action is thus due to feelings; but these are not merely 
feelings of pleasure and pain defined abstractly, but with regard to their 
content which is varied, individual, unique. It is to pleasure in this con- 
crete sense that we owe all the values which we can recognize. The 
highest good is accordingly happiness, or, better, blessedness, taken in 
this concrete sense, and recognized as involving the happiness of the uni- 
verse as a whole, and not our own happiness apart from this, but as included 
in it. 

Blessedness is of an aesthetic character. In beauty we have a per- 
ception of harmony between what is and what ought to be in a finite 
instance. And this harmony is not individual, limited to the personal 
experience of the person who perceives it, as is the merely agreeable, 
but has a certain objectivity and universality, and may be recognized by 
everyone. 2 Blessedness, apparently, would be harmony, not different 
in character from what we have in beauty, but which would extend to 
the entire universe. Our present theoretical knowledge is not sufficient 
to prove to us that the realizing of this blessedness is the aim that we see 
manifested in the world, or that such a concord does take place in the 
world, viewed in its totality. But where such a harmony is perceived 
by us in a particular phenomenon, we recognize beauty; and this fact 
leads us to believe in the possibility in the world taken as a whole. 

It is only by supposing that this is the supreme aim of the world that 
we can explain the phenomena of inspiration, adoration, and moral obli- 
gation. Lotze thus suggests a new manner of presenting the moral postu- 
lates. He criticises Kant's presentation of the moral law because it takes 
no notice of values. The imperativeness of duty can be explained only 
on the ground that the content of duty has value: value can only be a 
matter of feeling; and since the feeling in the case of moral values is not 
our own, it has to be referred to an infinite Spirit, God. 3 

Lotze 's use of blessedness reminds us very much of Fichte. The 
difference is, that while Fichte developed the thought chiefly in his later 
writings, the idea is more fundamental in Lotze 's ethics, and the aesthetic 

i Outlines of Psychology, § 50. 

2 Outlines of ^Esthetics (translated by Ladd), § 12. 

3 Outlines of the Philosophy of Religion (trans, bv Ladd), 114 ff. 



SEVERAL NINETEENTH-CENTURY NON-HEDONISTS 85 

side is presented. He also follows Fichte in the employment of conscience 
(which with him as with Fichte is a feeling) as the guide in morality. He 
says, however, that conscience speaks unambiguously only in respect 
to the simple and pure relations of one will to another, and that in more 
intricate matters we must look to axioms derived from general experience. 1 

Lotze represents an advance upon the Kant-Fichte-Hegel develop- 
ment in his recognition that feeling is not only a necessary instrument 
in the mechanism of the moral act after the moral judgment has 
taken place (as these authors recognized), but also that feeling furnishes 
the values employed in the moral judgment also. 2 The aesthetic character 
of morality, and the analogy between beauty and happiness, had already, 
as we have seen, been suggested by Herbart. But in Lotze 's insistence 
that feeling is an original factor in experience as truly as cognition, and 
not merely secondary phenomenon due to the interaction of thought 
presentations, he represents a genuine advance upon Herbart. 

The ideas suggested by Lotze seem to the present writer very suggestive 
and it is greatly to be regretted that he did not live to write them out and 
publish them in full. The difficulty in such a view is that the analogy 
between ethical and aesthetic judgments is not a complete parallel. Moral 
imperatives have a deeper and more thoroughgoing objectivity and uni- 
versality. Whether Lotze could have met this difficulty satisfactorily 
is the question. 

E. GREEN 

Feeling with Green is a logical prerequisite, not only for self- con- 
sciousness, as we have seen in the case of Lotze, but for any consciousness. 
Animals have this, in the sense of a felt impulse after riddance from pain, 
and will in the sense of "activity determined by feeling." 3 By pleasure 
Green understands "any unimpeded activity," 4 or "realization of capa- 
city," 5 thus definitely recognizing the pleasure of activity. In the animal 
state, action is initiated, as Green supposes, by immediate presentations 
of pleasure and pain. If there ever occurs a situation in human experi- 
ence in which there is action immediately for pleasurable or painful feel- 
ing, such action is upon the same plane, and is non-moral. 

To a self- conscious soul, however, feelings have an altogether altered 
significance, he describes his feelings to himself, distinguishes himself 
from them, and "is conscious of them as manifold relations in which he, 
the single self, stands to the world — in short as manifold facts." The 

« Outlines of Practical Philosophy, §9. * Ibid., § 276. 

2 Cf. Microcosmus (translation), I, 244-48. s Ibid., §361. 

3 Prolegomena to Ethics, § 119. ° Ibid., § 120. 



86 



PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 



unity which is given to feeling in self-consciousness alters the character 
of desire completely. In the animal state desire is for immediate pleasant 
feeling. In the human state, on the other hand, desire is for objects. 
In the attainment of these objects it is thought that a certain self-satis- 
faction will be found. But the objects are not desired — or at least the 
chief incentive in any desire is not for any enjoyable feeling tone that 
attends the attainment of the object. 

The argument by which this is reached is both positive and negative. 
Positively, it is the main thesis in this doctrine of knowledge that what 
Kant calls the "objective unity of apperception" is due to the action 
of the self in organizing experience. Without the work of the self we 
should not perceive objects at all. Consequently, we could not desire 
them. All that we should desire would be such feelings as we had experi- 
enced that were pleasurable. It thus seems to run as a corollary to his 
epistemology that a self-conscious being should desire certain of the objects 
which he perceives. Just as his intellectual life forms a unity in conse- 
quence of its organization by, and with reference to, a self, so his practical 
life is organized about this self whose satisfaction it seeks. All desire 
is for self-satisfaction; objects are desired because one imagines that 
the self will feel satisfaction in them. 

Negatively, Green devotes much space to showing that pleasure can 
not be the principal aim of a self-conscious being, whether his action is 
moral or immoral. There is no unitary principle in pleasure. Pleasure 
can be found in any unimpeded activity whatever. Any person who 
has regard for anything beyond the passing moment cannot find satis- 
faction in pleasure. The aim for a life of continuous pleasure or a sum 
of pleasures is impossible. Here Green's position is similar to Hegel's. 
The difference is that Hegel regards action for pleasure as possible, and 
as practiced by persons, but as irrational and immoral; Green does not 
think that pleasure can ever be the object of a self-conscious being; at 
least, if it can, action in such a condition is not immoral, but non-moral. 1 

There is always pleasure present as the result of any satisfaction of 
self; this is the reason why men sometimes imagine that the desire for 
objects is a desire for the pleasure which attends their attainment. 2 Green 
concedes that any interest or desire for an object may come to be rein- 
forced "by desire for the pleasures which, reflecting upon past analogous 
experience, the subject of the interest may expect as incidental to its satis- 
faction." 3 This concession to the doctrine of "cool self-love" is made 
with emphasis upon the condition that this desire is to be understood as 
*Op.cit., §§ii2, 125. * Ibid., §158. 3 Ibid., §161; cf. §228. 



SEVERAL NINETEENTH-CENTURY NON-HEDONISTS 87 

only reinforcement, and as in no way able to take the place of the main 
motive — self-realization. It is the realization of those objects in which 
we are mainly interested that forms the content of our idea of happiness. 1 

Happiness for Green is an ideal which leads a man to suppress par- 
ticular desires in the interest of other desires, in order that he may attain 
a state of general well-being in which they will all be satisfied so far as 
possible. Such a state is not to be conceived of as a co-ordination of 
pleasures — since pleasures do not admit of co-ordination — but as an ideal 
arising from the unity of our conscious and volitional life. 2 The effort 
for happiness psychologically is not an effort for pleasure, but for the reali- 
zation of various objects of desire, and such realization makes one the 
subject of happiness. Happiness is not the direct aim of an individual, 
any more than pleasure is. The distinction between what is right and 
what is wrong is not one that appertains to happiness any more than it 
does to pleasure. It is wholly a question of the filling of desire, the objects 
in which one seeks to realize one's self. 

The only way to test these seems to be whether or not they are such 
as will accord with the moral ideal by affording "an abiding satisfaction 
to an abiding self." The moral ideal by which they are to be tested has 
only partly become explicit up to the present time. We can recognize it 
only so far as it has become objectified in institutions like the family and 
the state. The moral ideal is social in character. So it is only in a social 
way that we can come to know the moral ideal, just as it is only in a social 
way that we come to have self-consciousness at all. A selfish life seems 
to be one in which sensuous impulses prevail, and in which one has not 
much social consciousness, because one has not much ^//-consciousness, 
using the term in his technical manner. 3 

For Green, then, pleasure has little moral significance. Since feeling 
is a prerequisite for self-consciousness, we may say that feeling is a pre- 
requisite for moral consciousness. But this does not furnish a criterion 
by which we can distinguish what is moral from what is immoral. True 
happiness is the reward of moral action, but this is not composed of pleas- 
ure, nor is it the direct object of desire and volition. The state of true 
happiness, in which the moral ideal is gradually being realized, cannot 
fail to be regarded by us as an enjoyable one; but it is questionable whether, 
in the case of any individual person, to say the least, it is any more enjoy- 
able than one in which the moral ideal is not being realized — indeed, 

1 Ibid., § 228. 3 Ibid., §§ 127, 128. 

3 At least this is the construction which I should put upon the sermon on The 
Witness of God. Cf. Prolegomena, § 232. 



88 PLEASURE IN N ON -HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

it may not be as much so. 1 Nor is he ready to admit that moral action 
upon the part of the individual always increases general happiness, though 
not that of the individual himself. We do not seek the happiness of 
others directly, any more than we do our own. We seek for others the 
attainment of objects that will afford satisfaction, just as we do for our- 
selves. 2 The moral reformer does not seek the pleasure of those for 
whom he labors, and Green thinks it doubtful whether his work increases 
their pleasure. 3 

As compared with Kant, we see an advantage in his treatment of 
happiness in one respect. Green's true happiness is the direct result 
of moral action. He postulates a future life simply in order that the reali- 
zation now going on may be continued and completed. Thus he avoids 
the difficulties which we observed in Kant's postulation of happiness 
in the complete good. On the other hand, one feels obliged to question 
whether in his scheme of self-realization Green has at all adequately 
provided for the feeling side of our nature. With him, as with Hegel, 
feeling occupies a rather incidental place in moral action. To be sure, 
he makes it a prerequisite for consciousness, and in an altered form for 
self-consciousness; but it plays no moral function, except possibly some- 
times to reinforce moral action. Introspection seems to assure us that 
emotion plays a very real part in moral life and volition, and that its place 
can hardly be of so fortuitous a character as he tries to make out. If 
feeling is of such minor significance, why is it, as Green himself admits, 
that, in its practical applications, Utilitarianism so often coincides with 
his view ? One is led to suspect that there must be some reason for this 
harmony, involving a closer harmony between happiness and the moral 
ideal than he has indicated. 4 

It seems, therefore, that Green's account of self-realization would 
have been more satisfactory if he had attached to feeling a significance 
somewhat similar to that suggested by Lotze. The difficulty — and it is 
a serious one for an ethics of self-realization — is somehow to allow feeling 

1 Prolegomena, §§276, 277. 

2 Ibid., §§235, 236. 

3 Ibid., §277. 

4 An attempt to effect such a union has been made by a keen critic, but partial 
follower of Green, Professor J. Dewey, Syllabus of Ethics (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1897), 
and Philosophical Review, Vol. II. Professor H. W. Stuart, a pupil of Professor 
Dewey, has worked out the logical aspects of this new reconstruction of self-realiza- 
tion, "Valuation as a Logical Process" (published in the Studies in Logical Theory, 
edited by Dewey), and "The Logic of Self -Realization" (published in the University 
of California Contributions to Philosophy, Vol. I). 



i.0FC 



SEVERAL NINETEENTH-CENTURY N ON -HEDONISTS 89 

to play a real part in moral valuation, and yet give to moral ideals the 
unconditional rational authority which they require. Green seems better 
to have fulfilled the latter demand, and Lotze the former. To satisfy 
both demands at the same time is a task open to contemporary self- 
realizationists. 

F. NIETZSCHE 

Nietzsche was mainly occupied, in his treatment of feeling, in com- 
bating Utilitarianism, and other doctrines which are disposed to make 
pleasure a criterion of moral values, or the psychological motive to action. 
While in his earlier works we occasionally find a passage which suggests 
the idea that one should act for one's pleasure and happiness, 1 such pas- 
sages are clearly opposed to the main tenor of his thought, and simply 
indicate that he had not yet thought out his doctrine thoroughly. It is 
only in his posthumous works that we see indications that the functional 
part which feeling plays in action is to be taken account of. 2 The con- 
cessions there made, small though they are, indicate that he felt the neces- 
sity of taking some account of pleasure and pain, and lead us to believe 
that, if he had been able to complete Der Wille zum Macht, he would have 
given us a fairly detailed statement of his idea as to the part that feeling 
plays in action. 

To be sure, this part would not have been an exalted one ; but it would 
have been a part. The only value which he regards as final is the "will 
for power." This also furnishes the motive to action. But where he 
says that all sensations and perceptions (Empfindungen und Sinnes- 
Wahmehmungen) originally have arisen in some sort of relationship to 
the pleasure or pain of the organism, 3 though unwilling to make pleasure 
and pain indicative of moral values now, he seems to make them represent 
a necessary stage through which every new constituent of our conscious- 
ness has passed. 

Pleasure and pain are phenomena which accompany human activity, 
though they are never the motives for it, nor the ends to which it is directed. 
They seem to be the simplest and most primitive form in which judgments 
of value can be made, pleasure being a feeling of increased power, and 
pain of diminished power. 4 Whether something will be pleasant or 

1 E.g., Morgenrothe, §§ 104-8. 

2 Chiefly in the aphorisms published in Vol. XIII of his Werke, and the portions 
of Der Wille zum Macht in Vol. XV. 

3 Werke, XIII, 270. 

4 Werke, XIII, 254, 271 ff.; XV, 323, 331 ff. and passim. 



go PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

painful depends upon the amount of strength which one has. What 
will appear painful and dangerous to a weak man will be pleasant and 
welcome to a strong one, who finds in it an opportunity to exercise his 
power. 1 A point that he makes much of is that pain is often desired 
for the opposition which it affords, and the opportunity of exercising 
one's might in overcoming it. Pleasure itself is often experienced as a 
kind of rhythm, in which pain keeps appearing as a stimulus to further 
activity and increased pleasure as a result. 2 The fact that the original 
impulse to power quite as often evokes pain as pleasure is a proof that 
neither is its aim, but that both are employed only to indicate the means 
for achieving power. 

They indicate this, however, only very imperfectly. They are "the 
most stupid thinkable expression for judgments." 3 What they stand for 
is much better expressed in a rational judgment; the utility of feeling is 
simply to indicate the means by which the will for power can express 
itself before rational judgments have been formed. To prefer a feeling 
to a rational judgment is to prefer an inherited tendency based, it may be, 
upon an originally erroneous judgment, instead of thinking out the matter 
carefully for one's self. "To trust to one's feeling — means to obey one's 
grandfather and grandmother and their ancestors in a higher degree 
than the gods that dwell within us, namely our reason and experi- 



ence. 



,J 4 



While Nietzsche's recognition of the pleasure of unimpeded activity 
represents a more adequate psychological comprehension of pleasure, 
his general attitude in regarding pleasure as a primitive form of judgment 
reminds one very much of the rationalists. Like them, he makes feeling 
perform the same kind of a function as thought, but more imperfectly. 
The difficulties involved in a view of this sort have perhaps been suffi- 
ciently exposed in the discussion of the perfectionists. 

In his emphasis upon the principle that pain is often willed in order to 
carry out our purposes (in his case the will for power), Nietzsche has 
emphasized a fact which many ethical writers have overlooked. Pain 
need not represent a lapse from a previous state of well-being. It may 
rather be an advance to a higher state. To find a piece of rag-time music 
which in the past has given one entire satisfaction now become inhar- 
monious, may indicate that one's musical taste has improved. To feel 

1 Werke, XV, 331. 

2 Ibid., XIII, 274; XV, 325,328, 332. 

3 Ibid., XV, 331. 

4 The Dawn of Day, § 35 (trans, by Johanna Volz). 



SEVERAL NINETEENTH-CENTURY NON-HEDONISTS 91 

displeasure in an action which formerly has seemed quite right may be 
an indication that one's moral discernment has improved; and the fact 
that we now feel displeasure and pain does not indicate a moral lapse, but 
a moral advance. The appearance of the obstacle which affords the pain 
gives us something to be overcome, and is an opportunity for moral self- 
realization. 



VII. CONCLUSION 

In conclusion let us briefly review the modern non-hedonistic develop- 
ment through which we have passed, in its ethical attitude toward pleasure, 
feeling, and happiness. 

When the philosophy of the Renaissance was led, by its individualistic 
tendencies, to recognize in personal pleasure a motive to action, no serious 
problem at first seemed to be involved. Descartes defined pleasure as 
"the sense of some perfection." He likewise defined happiness and 
virtue in terms of perfection. He thought that in attaining individual 
perfection a person is obtaining the most pleasure and happiness possible, 
and at the same time performing his duty. While laying more emphasis 
upon the spiritual and religious aspects of perfection, Malebranche pre- 
served the same co-ordination of pleasure, happiness, and duty in terms 
of perfection. 

Later rationalists had more difficulty in maintaining this co-ordination. 
Spinoza's fidelity to the mathematical method led him to reduce feeling 
to cognitive terms. Pleasure became confused consciousness of per- 
fection, while happiness or beatitude was preserved in the moral ideal as 
clear and distinct consciousness of perfection. This forced a sharp diver- 
gence between beatitude and pleasure, but did not save the former from 
containing distinctly affective elements — i. e., confused, and hence imper- 
fect, thought. Thus the co-ordination logically breaks down, both between 
pleasure and beatitude, and between beatitude and perfection. It also 
fails to give much room for any social content. Leibniz escaped some of 
Spinoza's difficulties by following Descartes in recognizing intellectual 
pleasures, and viewing happiness as an active and progressive state in 
which new degrees of perfection are constantly being attained. He thus 
effects a closer union between pleasure and happiness and the attainment 
of perfection. He likewise fails, however, to afford an adequate place 
for duty and social demands not evidently coincident with individual 
perfection and pleasure. 

The difficulties in the rationalistic co-ordination appear with increased 
sharpness in Wolff. His use of the mathematical method leads him to 
reduce pleasure to confused cognition, and even to make it an attribute 
of objects, losing sight of its subjective character altogether. Moral 
perfection he regards as altogether rational in its nature, and quite opposed 
to such confused elements as pleasure and impulse. However, he cannot 

92 



CONCLUSION 93 

wholly dispense with the sensibility, and its confused feelings and impulses, 
in order to effect the carrying-out of the dictates of the reason in the world 
of action. The reward of the attainment of perfection, and at least a 
partial motive to effort in this direction, must therefore consist in a happi- 
ness composed of pleasure. Having thus thrown pleasure out of the 
window as confused and irrational thought, he is obliged to admit it again 
at the door as the reward of rational action, and the attainment of per- 
fection. The co-ordination had thus become full of internal inconsist- 
encies as well as very narrow in its recognition of social demands, when 
the problem was again attacked by Mendelssohn. The latter and his 
contemporaries cleared up the psychology of pleasure, and rediscovered 
its subjective characteristics. Influenced by the British moral sense 
writers, Mendelssohn also asserted the moral worth and dignity of the 
feelings. In thus disclosing the ethical significance of the feelings, how- 
ever, he made the difficulties in the old co-ordination in terms of perfection 
more difficult than ever. The only suggestion toward a solution of the 
difficulties which he is able to make is simply to say that somehow the 
reason must receive the warmth and impulsive character of the feelings 
in order to secure its motivation, while the feelings must acquire the clear 
insight and deliberateness of the reason. 

It was at this point that Kant inherited the problem; but before review- 
ing the manner in which he treated it, let us resurvey the development 
in Great Britian. 

There the movement had begun with the same co-ordination of pleas- 
ure, happiness, morality, and perfection; and perhaps with a stronger 
conviction of the eternal and unconditional character of morality. When 
the growth of individualism had led to the belief that the necessary motive 
to action must be found in the feelings of the individual, the problem 
was forced upon the adherents of the old morality, how to secure the moti- 
vation of this latter. Their empirical method gave them in the main 
free play in attacking the problem; and to their minds, unclouded by 
the notion of a ruling conception, the seriousness of the problem was 
much more clearly appreciated. 

The first method adopted attempted to secure the motivation of morality 
by widening the range of personal pleasure so as to make it include the 
pleasures of the moral sense, benevolence, and sympathy. Such was 
the effort of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hartley, Hume, and Adam Smith; 
the last three of these accounting for the genesis of these higher, moral 
pleasures through association. This line of argument finally broke down, 
as it was found impossible to secure sufficient authority and stability for 
a morality derived wholly from the feelings. 



94 PLEASURE IN NON-HEDONISTIC SYSTEMS 

Before attempts to derive a non-hedonistic morality from selfish con- 
stituents by means of association and sympathy had ceased, Butler had 
already introduced a new line of attack. He recognized the immediate 
divergence between duty and pleasure, but sought to overcome it ulti- 
mately by philosophical arguments and considerations of a future life. 
The earlier Scottish writers sought to minimize this divergence as much 
as possible, but had to fall back upon Butler's arguments in the end. 
However, the tendency to question the genuineness of pleasure as exclu- 
sive motive to action kept increasing. Butler had shown that immediate 
impulses are as likely to be opposed to happiness as to favor it, and that 
self-love is a rational principle of conduct, and not an immediate impulse. 
It was only another step, though the deliberate Scots were a long time 
in taking it, to assert that the moral sense is itself due to original constit- 
uents independent from the impulse for pleasure. Inevitable motivation 
in the interests of pleasure and happiness need no longer be conceded. 
After Brown had arrived at this position and asserted the presence in our 
nature of higher moral values, the problem of pleasure and happiness 
seems to have been felt to be solved, and the discussion of it largely disap- 
pears from intuitionist treatises. However, an interesting concession 
to the utility of pleasure made by Martineau leads us to suspect that he, 
at least, knew that a working criterion of morality cannot ignore the 
feelings altogether. 

To return to Kant. After he became convinced that English ethics 
based upon feeling led to difficulties no less serious than those of the Wolf- 
fian school, he worked out his own doctrine of the categorical imperative. 
While in this he escaped some of the more crass inconsistencies of the 
Wolffian school, such as followed from the inclusion of all morality within 
the conception of perfection, and making pleasure an attribute of objects, 
he nevertheless had to face two serious problems inherited from them: 
(i) How is a purely rational morality to secure its motivation by the sen- 
sible, affective nature of man, and so be carried out in action ? (2) What 
is to be the relation of happiness to the attainment of such a morality ? 

Kant answered the first problem by securing the motivation of duty 
through the pleasures and pains of reverence and interest in the moral law. 
He answered the second by making a happiness composed of pleasures a 
necessary ethical postulate, and a constituent in the complete good. 

These somewhat forced explanations were not satisfactory to the 
successors of Kant, and our history of nineteenth-century writers is largely 
an account of the different ways in which they endeavored to solve these 
problems for themselves. 



CONCLUSION 95 

Fichte 's only solution of the first problem was a further expansion of 
the idea of reverence into conscience; he solved the second by refining 
happiness from its non-moral constituents, and making it wholly consist 
in intellectual and moral pleasures. Hegel solved the first problem in 
much the same manner as Fichte, and equally unsatisfactorily. He 
solved the second by making happiness only a transitional stage in the 
attainment of a higher, social, and objective morality, wholly intellectual 
in character, in which this imperfect ideal should be transcended. Both 
Fichte and Hegel followed Kant in taking psychological hedonism for 
granted, and are consequently forced to suppose a sharp opposition between 
the impulsive, feeling side of our nature, and the rational, moral side. 
Their attempts to overcome this dualism are unsuccessful, Fichte 's account 
being hardly less mechanical than Kant's, and Hegel's eliminating the 
feelings entirely from final moral development. 

The work of Schopenhauer exposed the pessimism really involved in 
Kant's psychological definition of pleasure, and in psychological hedon- 
ism — consequences which Fichte and Hegel had overlooked. Later 
ethical non-hedonists, warned by Schopenhauer's pessimism, have avoided 
the false premises of his argument. 

The first of Kant's problems thus no longer furnishes so acute diffi- 
culties to writers of this type, though it can hardly be said to have been 
finally solved. A solution of the second problem is presented by Herbart 
and Lotze, who find in the harmony of aesthetic pleasure an analogy to 
the harmony that would come from the realization of moral effort in happi- 
ness. Such an analogy, though very suggestive, fails to account for the 
unconditional and obligatory character of moral duty. 

Green is more successful in working out the development of the moral 
ideal, as regards its obligatory character, and in showing that it does not 
need to depend upon pleasure for its motivation. He fails, however, 
on the other hand, in securing a working criterion of moral values : since 
valuation involves the feelings, and these he has not adequately recognized. 

While none of these attempts have solved either of the problems, all 
of them indicate some progress in that direction. There certainly is some 
significance in the aesthetic analogy, though Lotze has exaggerated it. 
Green's theory of self-realization, and even Nietzsche's caustic aphorisms 
contain valuable material which will assist future writers essaying those 
problems. With the better comprehension of the psychology of ethics 
which we have at the present time, we may certainly expect that twen- 
tieth-century ethical writers will at least make large contributions toward 
their final solution. 



OCT 28 190? 














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